STEVE WESTON IS the voice on the line when I pick up. He says he read about me in the paper. I didn’t know that many people read “Sherie.” I guess it’s one of those things like picking your nose. You only do it in front of other people if they already know you do it. I hear jukebox and barroom noises behind him. It’s a weekday, so that surprises me.
The first thing that you notice about Steve, if you see him, more than if you hear him, but still if you hear him, is that he’s black. But that doesn’t mean you expect to hear him calling from a barroom in the middle of the day. Steve came back from Nam with the attitude of “I’m glad that’s over. I got out of that alive, and intact, and I’m going to live the rest of my life straight and peaceful-like.” A lot of people didn’t come back that way. A lot of people came back thinking the world’s a toilet and I’m going to shit in it. Or grab what you can as soon as you can because there’s incoming coming. Or I went and I fought for you and now you owe me a hero’s life and a hero’s living and if I don’t get it, I’m going to pout.
I’m lucky. I always knew the world was a hard and dirty place. That nobody cared for heroes. It’s always “But what did you do for me lately?” That’s what my daddy gave to me. He gave me no illusions to lose.
So when Steve came back, he found himself what he called a good woman. A churchgoing woman. Who wanted to have regular babies, get wide, keep a clean house and food on the table. He got himself a steady job. First it was a car wash or something like that, a lot of people would have felt they were too good for. He went through several others, but he was always trying to get on the line at the GM plant down in Van Nuys. It took him a couple of years. But he finally got in over there. It’s UAW and top dollar for unskilled labor, $17 an hour or more by now. That means a base of $35,000 a year, holidays, vacation, sick pay, plus medical and pension and all of that. Anybody who wants to can push that up to $45,000, even $70,000, with overtime.
“I seen that and I ax myself, is there more than one Joe Broz? But I says to myself this got to be the one, ’cause the one I know be the one with more balls than brains. And that’s why she love him so, right, Joe?”
Four kids, a fat wife, four cars, all Chevies, what the hell is he doing in a bar on Wednesday before lunch sounding too merry and mournful all at once. “What’s going on, Steve?”
“I’m alright. Al-right. I seen this, and I has to call. I calls you at the office and they says you gone. Gone for good. They gives me some number and a real nice lady answer the phone. I ax myself, is this Magdalena Lazlo I’m talking with? So I ax her, is you she? And she is. I tells her I’m a longtime friend from, you know, Vietnam. And she says she is sure you will be happy to hear from me because Vietnam was a central experience in your life and she gives me this number. Where is you?”
“My new office. What’s wrong, Steve?”
“Nothin’ fucking wrong. I’s OK. You’s OK. Semper fuckin’ fi. Marines forever. I just seen you got this fine thing happen and so’s I call you.”
“How’s your wife?”
“She fine, she fine. She not so fine as yours is fine, but she fine.”
“The kids? How are the kids?”
“Kids fine. They trouble sometime, but that what they there for. Keep your mind occupied with their trouble, keep it off your own. No mo’ trouble than the next kid.”
“This is a fine place. They calls it Ray’s Sweetwater. Down here near where’s I live.”
“Baldwin Hills? You gonna be there awhile?”
“Yes, I guess I am. I guess I am.”
“Why don’t I come drink a few with you.”
“You come down but you best pass for high yaller,” he says. He thinks that’s very funny and I hear him chortling away as he hangs up the phone.
I walk into Ray’s Sweetwater. It’s more what you’d call Watts than Baldwin Hills. It’s cool and dark, especially after the high, hard Southern California sun. You’ve seen this scene in the movies. Mostly Westerns. A stranger walks into the bar. Sudden silence. Deadly stares. Cut away to the toughest hombre in the room. Insert shots as the bartender and various hangers-on look to him for their cue. Is he gonna kill the stranger right this second or toy with him first? Of course, what they don’t know is that I’m not a real Chinaman, I’m David Carradine, a Shaolin monk and I can kick faster than an ordinary man can shoot. I’m Alan Ladd, but folks just call me Shane.
Suddenly, there’s a voice from way in the back of the room, back at a booth behind the pool table. “Hey, you all, leave him the fuck alone. He’s a nigger like us. Tha’s just a flesh-colored Band-Aid on his face.”
There is reasonably universal laughter. Some of it more amused than the joke deserves, but entirely welcome. The place relaxes. I have been vouched for. I’m passing for black. I walk to the back. The music is not too bad. Old-fashioned, more R&B than rap. It comes out of an extravagant jukebox that plays CDs.
Steve’s at a table with four other guys. Three of them are late forties, early fifties, the fourth guy is older, sixty or more, hair gone almost white. They all have beer and snacks too. Peanuts and fried pork rinds. I sit down. Conversation stops. It’s not hostile, just still. A young waitress wearing Lycra top and bottom, pink against purple, saunters over and sticks out an ample hip. The old guy with the white hair pats it fondly. She tells him he’s too old. He says the problem is not that he’s too old, it’s that he’s too big. I ask for a bottle of Bud and one more of whatever everybody else is drinking. I offer a twenty, she snatched it up.
“Give the man change,” Steve says. “Don’t you be playing no games.”
“He a white man,” the old man says to one of the younger ones. “Why don’t we ask him?”
“Well, that don’t mean he know the truth. He could be iggerant.”
“I says we ask him.”
“I says you’re full of shit.”
“This here, with the white hair and the big mouth, is Marlon Mapes,” Steve says. “That’s Red, and Kenny, and Shavers.”
“We got an argument going. And these fools, they can’t see the truth,” Red says. “Are you ready for the truth, white man?”
“This a friend of mine,” Steve says.
“He’s a white friend of yours,” Kenny says. “And that’s the truth.”
“There’s times and places black and white don’t matter,” Steve says.
“Always matters,” Red says.
“Always,” Shavers says.
“Like when don’t it matter?” Marlon asks.
“It always matters,” Red says. “That’s your bottom line.”
“Fuckin’ A. Black, white. Bottom line. You right, you right.”
“OK, Steve, when don’t it matter?”
He can’t just say, “Nam—didn’t matter in Nam.” Because it did. It mattered on leave. It mattered back at the base. It mattered when there was music to be played, liquor to be scored, dope to be used, promotions to be handed out, orders to be followed. It mattered all the time and every day. We both knew that.
But sometimes it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter on patrol. At least for Steve and for me. It didn’t matter in a firefight. It didn’t matter when the VC and the NVA announced that they had business that transcended race.
“It didn’t matter when I lay dying,” Steve says. He’s pretty drunk to be saying this, I think. He stands up. He pulls his shirt out of his pants. He’s gone to fat. That isn’t any fresh-from-Parris-Island lean Marine standing there, bare belly poking out over his pants, scars twenty years old. “Carried me bleeding. Out of an ambush on his back.”
“Prob’bly kept your fat body ’tween the bullets and his-self,” Red says.
These are fightin’ words because that’s a sacred memory. Everybody gets that and the others tell him to shut up. Kenny stands between Red and Steve. The Lycra girl shows up with the beers and a gin and tonic.
“I di’n’t go no Vietnam,” Red says. “Me and Muhammad Ali. Ain’t no Viet Cong ever shot at me. White man usin’ black men to fight their war. Cannon fodder.”
“Fuck you, Red,” Kenny says. “You stupid. I been to Nam. You don’t shut up I hits you myself.”
“What you got to understand,” Steve says, “is what it was like.”
“They don’t need to hear this. This is an old story,” I say. I pour my beer into the glass. It doesn’t look golden like it does on TV. It looks yellow, like piss. Must be the lighting.
“What the VC liked to do, they liked to get one man, wounded, in a killing zone. Screamin’. It works better if he’s screamin’. Then his buddies try to come for him. And they pick them off, one by one. Maybe gets two out there screamin’. You gots two choices. You sit there and you listen to your buddy screamin’ and don’t do nothin’ and feel like you is shit, cause your buddy is screamin’ and you’re doing nothin’. Or you goes and tries to get him. Then, you know what? Not only is you dyin’, you feelin’ like a fool while you dyin’.”
“Don’t want to die feelin’ like no fool,” Marlon says. “That is addin’ your insult to your injury. Umm-hm.”
“That’s what it was like,” Steve says. “You got to understand that. I was screamin’ and this man . . . this man, he came and he got me and he carried me out.”
That shuts everybody up. At least for a moment. The air-conditioning is humming. There’s condensation on the bottles. Aaron Neville is on the jukebox.
“Listen here, Joe. That’s you’ name, Joe? Right? Listen here,” Red says. “I want you to tell all these people here, sittin’ at this table, the truth. The white man is afraid of the black man. That is a fact, right?’
“Don’t play into his shit.”
“Go on, answer the man.”
“A lot of white people are afraid of black people,” I say.
“Of black men,” Red says. “The white man is afraid of the black man. He don’t mind the black woman. He like dark meat from time to time, ain’t that a fact.”
“Ain’t nobody afraid of the black woman,” Kenny says. “Except you. You ‘fraid of your mama and your wife, the blackest womens I ever seen. And they got your ass whipped.”
“I am making a serious point here,” Red says. “So shut your jive mouth. That’s what you do, Marlon. Somebody saying somethin’ and you lay your nonsensical jive on it, ’cause you don’t have the concentration of mind to deal with the issues. You see what I’m saying. No concentration of mind.”
“So is you is or is you ain’t gonna make a point?”
“I am. You shut up and you wait. The white man will do anything to cut down the black man. That is an undeniable philosophical truth. Is it not?”
“Amen.”
“Uh-huh.”
“The truth,” Marlon says.
They all look at me. I say, “Anybody want another round?”
“Don’t let ’em intimidate you,” Steve says.
“I’m not intimidated, I’m a beer drinker.”
“I hear you,” Marlon says. He signals to the waitress. At the prospect of another free one he slurps down the gin and tonic that’s currently in front of him a little faster than he’s been doing.
“What I am getting to, is AIDS.”
“Oh Lord protect my dick,” Marlon says.
“You’all ever try any that safe sex?” Shavers says. “Sheeit, you might as well be doing it yourself. And rubbers, you better off doing it yourself.”
“Dogs you been doin’ it with, you need a full body condom,” Marlon says.
“You so old, you manage to do it, you probably die of happy and surprise ’fore you die of the AIDS,” Shavers says.
“Problem with you men is you so lost in your dozens and trash talking you forget that there is a political situation going on.”
“Nobody forget there’s a political situation goin’ on,” Steve says. “An economic one too. We just want to forget it.”
“In the sixties the black man was on the rise,” Red says. “And the white man couldn’t stand that. America couldn’t stand that. So Whitey went to work on ways to stop the black man. It was the CIA in charge. Now this here is a public and documented fact. Even the lying, prevaricatin’ Jew-run white media, they admits to this fact. Which is that the CIA in the name Air America became the number-one heroin runners in the entire planet They run the opium out of the Golden Triangle, and they made an alliance with the Italian and the Jew Mafias to sell exclusively in the black ghetto. To destroy the black man.”
“That’s the truth.”
“I read that.”
“Amen.”
“Alright,” Red says. “White man, are you going to deny that?”
“Are you with the CIA?” Shavers asks out of nowhere.
Everybody looks at me like maybe I am and Shavers is on to something important. “My man, here, with the CIA?” Steve says, he puts his hand on my shoulder. How drunk is he? What’s he going to say? There are things that he knows that these people should not hear. “You don’t know, you can’t imagine half the things that this here man done. But let me tell you what. You can’t tell a book by lookin’ at the cover. He may look like a redneck, motherfuck Polack, but he’s a lover. That’s what he is. My man here, to whom you are being so very rude, is the true love of Magdalena Lazlo.”
Everybody has to make a comment about that. None of it offensive, most of it impressed. Except Red. “You know, I am in the middle of makin’ my philosophical point and I would like to recommence that when you all get bored admiring on how fine a piece of . . . ” He looks at me and decides not to say “pussy.” I understand by that hesitation, which is not politeness, but an acceptance of a boundary, that this is not a dangerous place. These are just five old men, though not necessarily with more years than me, but old. Who are not going to rise up in their blackness and provoke an incident to destroy this particular white person. Five men with nothing to do but meet in the back of a bar during the day, passing time, dragging out cheap beers, with talk that doesn’t mean action, talk that just passes the time, because they have no place else to go. No mission. No function. No job.
No job. That’s what’s happened to Steve.
“That wasn’t enough. So the CIA, they decides to attack the black man through his greatest strength. So they invented a disease you get with your dick. Acquire Immune Deficiency Syndrome. And they field-tested it out in Africa. Then they brought it to America. See, the black man he’s more capable of sexual pleasure than your white man, plus he got a bigger, more powerful dick than the white man and he use it more. Ain’t that the truth. Ain’t that the truth, white man?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I never had a black man’s dick. How do you know so much about white men’s dicks?”
“Ou-wee. He got you.”
“Done got you good.”
“Amen.”
They’re laughing and repeating the punch line. “Steve,” I say softly, “can you and me talk. Privately. I need to talk to you about something.”
He looks around, sees an empty corner, the other side of the pool table. He grabs his beer by the neck and lumbers up. I do the same with mine and follow him. It seems he doesn’t have to explain or make excuses.
I hear, as we’re walking away, Red still talking. “Alright. He made a funnin’ remark. But I’m talkin’ ‘bout reality here and you are choosin’ ignorance. CIA made AIDS. It was the establishment, the honky, uptight, own-all-the-money, establishment counterattack on freedom and good times. Read the statistics, Goddammit. Forget the faggots, tha’s just a smoke screen. A smoke screen, to detract from the real target. The real target is you.”
Steve and I sit down. He’s got a lot of pride, and I can tell that right now he’s in a world of hurt. I’m guessing about him losing his job, but I’m pretty sure I’m right. When he tells that story about me carrying him out, he doesn’t bother to say he returned the favor. Steve is a person with a kind of pride. He don’t cry and he don’t beg. Even when he was out there, in the killing zone, he might have cursed out loud, but he didn’t cry and he didn’t beg. If he doesn’t want to tell me that he’s a man with a wife and four children, with no way he can think to earn a living, then I’m not going to ask. I understand about that kind of pride.
So I come up with an idea of how to help him while pretending that I’m not. Which, as it turns out, is an idea I should have had anyway. “I’m hoping,” I say, “that you can get away from your job for a while. I need some help. There’s only two people in the world I trust. And Joey, he’s dead.” Steve knew Joey. Knows how he died. He was there. Joey died in Nam. “So if you can get away from the fuckin’ line, I got a job for you. I can’t give you no seventeen something an hour, but I can swing fifteen, if that’ll do you.”
“Well, my man, you’s in luck.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
“General fuckin’ Motors is going out of fuckin’ business. They ain’t cutting the chairman and the managers, of course, they cuttin’ the niggers and the rednecks on the line. How many years I been building Chevrolets? How many years I been building and buyin’ American? How many years, Joe? Fuck ’em.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“You figured that, didn’t you? That I down on my luck. You my frien’. Which it ain’t easy to say about no white man, but fuck you, Joe. I don’t need no charity. No I don’t and I don’t want it.”
“Fuck you, Steve. Sit down. I need help. Sit down, I’ll explain it to you.”