RODNEY FINISHED HIS BEER in slow, deliberate swallows, peering over the rim of his mug at the other black, who, having polished off three previous mugs of draft, now sat watching Rodney expectantly, being quite obvious with his eyes that he held no doubt that more beer was forthcoming. Rodney ignored his eyes. He licked his lips. He tabled the empty mug. “Now give it to me again,” he said to the heavily bearded beer-hungry black still eyeing him, now demandingly, from across the small booth. “Let me see if I have it all down.”
“How ’bout throwing some more suds on me?” said the black.
“In a minute,” said Rodney.
The black considered. “I’m dry again. Another taste.”
Rodney sighed, considered his position from behind the sigh, made himself look annoyed and then grudgingly raised his hand until the cigar-chewing bartender noticed, stopped his stooped glass-washing dance behind the counter, and nodded to the waitress, sitting on a stool at the bar, to replenish them. She was slow about getting up. It was a lazy day: the two men in the booth were the only customers.
“Now,” said Rodney. “Give it to me again.”
The other man smiled. He had won again. “It’s this way,” he said to Rodney.
Rodney ignored the waitress as she pushed the two fresh mugs onto the table while his companion paused to consider her ass bouncing beneath the cloth of her blue dress. Lighting another cigarette, Rodney observed that the waitress wore no stockings and felt himself getting uncomfortable.
“Well?” he said.
“It’s this way,” his companion said again. “Your bag is where you keep whatever you do best. Whatever is in your bag is your thing. Some cats call it your stick, but it means the same. Now, when you know you got your thing going all right, you say ‘I got myself together’ or ‘I got my game together.’”
“All right, all right,” said Rodney. “I’ve got it down now.” He was growing very irritated at the other man, who smiled all the time in a superior way and let the beer wet his gold tooth before he swallowed, as if expecting Rodney to be impressed with its gleam. Rodney was not impressed. He disliked condescension, especially from Willie, whom he regarded in most respects as his inferior.
“Anything else I should know?” Rodney snapped.
“Yeah, baby-boy,” Willie said slow and matter-of-factly, implying, in his accents, a whole world of essential instruction being overlooked for want of beer and money and mind and other necessities forever beyond Rodney’s reach. “There’s lots. There’s lots and lots.”
“Like what?”
Willie drained his mug. “You know about the big ‘I Remember Rock ’n Roll’ Memorial in Cleveland last week?”
“No.” Rodney was excited. “Who was there?”
“All the cats from the old groups.”
“Anything special happen?”
“Hell yes!” Willie smiled again and looked very pleased with himself. “Fatso Checkers didn’t show. The cats would have tore the place down but Dirty Rivers filled in for him. He made up a song right on stage. Man, the cats dug it, they went wild they dug it so.”
“What’s the song?”
“I donno.”
“Is it on record?”
“Not yet. He just made it up.”
“There’s no place I can check it out?”
Again Willie smiled. “You can follow the other squares and check out this week’s issue of Soul. They might have a piece on it.”
“I don’t have time,” Rodney said. “I’ve got my studies to do.”
“You don’t have to, then; just be cool.”
Rodney got up. “That’s it,” he said to Willie. “I’ll check you out later.” He put two dollars down on the table and turned to go. Willie reached over and picked up the bills. “That’s for the beer,” Rodney cautioned him.
“Sure,” said Willie.
Rodney walked toward the door. “Be cool,” he heard Willie say from behind him. He did not look back. He knew that Willie and possibly the waitress and even the bartender would be smiling.
Although he felt uncomfortable in that area of the city, Rodney decided to walk around and digest all that he had been told before driving back to the University. He had parked and locked his car on a small side street and felt relatively protected from the rows and rows of aimless men who lined the stoops of houses and posts and garbage cans on either side of the street, their eyes seemingly shifty, their faces dishonest, their broad black noses alert and sniffing, feeling the air for the source of the smell which Rodney half believed rose from the watch and the wallet and the valuables stored in his pocket. He walked faster. He felt their eyes on his back and he was very uncomfortable being there, in the rising heat from the sidewalk, amid the smells of old food and wine and urine which rose with the heat.
He passed two boys with gray-black, ashy faces and running noses who laughed as they chased a little black girl up and down the steps of a tenement. “Little Tommy Tucker was a bad motherfucker,” one of the boys half sang, half spoke, and they all laughed. Rodney thought it obscene and a violation of a protective and sacred barrier between two distinctively different age groups. But after a few more steps he began to think that it was very clever. He stopped. He looked back. He began to memorize it. Then he began to walk back toward them, still at play on the steps, having already forgotten the inventiveness of a moment before. Rodney was about to call to them to repeat the whole verse when a robust and short-haired dark woman in a tight black dress that was open at the side came out of the tenement and down the stairs and began to undulate her way, sensually, toward him. The three children followed her, laughing as they each attempted to imitate her walk. Just when he was about to pass her, a light blue Ford pulled over to the curb next to her and a bald-headed white man leaned, questioningly, out of the driver’s window toward the big woman. She stopped, and looking the man directly in the eye with a hint of professional irritation on her round, hard face, asked, “How much?”
“Ten,” the man said.
“Hell no,” she said turning to go in a way that, while sharp and decisive, also suggested that there was a happy chance that, upon the occurrence of certain conditions, as yet unnamed, she might not go at all.
“Twelve,” said the man.
The woman looked at Rodney for a moment; then she looked the leaning man full in the face with fierce eyes. “Fuck you!” she said matter-of-factly.
“Well, damn if you’re worth more than that,” the man said, ignoring Rodney and the children.
“Get the hell on,” said the woman, and began to walk slowly and sensually in the direction in which the car was pointed.
“She ain’t got no drawers on,” exclaimed one of the children.
“Can you see her cunt?”
“Yeah” was the answer. They all ran after her and the car, which was now trailing her, leaving Rodney alone on that part of the hot sidewalk. But he was not minding the heat now, or the smells, or the lounging men, or even Willie’s condescension; he only minded that he had not thought to bring a notebook because he was having difficulty arranging all this in his head for memorization.
Returning to his car at last, Rodney paused amid afternoon traffic to purchase a copy of Muhammad Speaks from a conservatively dressed, cocoa-brown Muslim on a street corner. Rodney tried to be very conspicuous about the transaction, doing his absolute best to engage the fellow in conversation while the homebound cars, full of black and white workers, passed them. “What made you join?” he asked the Muslim, a striking fellow who still retained the red eyes of an alcoholic or drug addict.
“Come to see us and find out for yourself,” said the fellow, his eyes not on Rodney but on the moving traffic lest he should miss the possibility of a sale.
“Are you happy being a Muslim?” asked Rodney.
“Come to our mosque, brother, and find out.”
“I should think you’d get tired of selling papers all the time.”
The Muslim, not wanting to insult Rodney and lose a possible conversion and at the same time more than slightly irritated, struck a compromise with himself, hitched his papers under his arms and moved out into the street between the two lanes of traffic. “Come to our mosque, brother, and gain all knowledge from the lips of the Messenger,” he called back to Rodney. Rodney turned away and walked to his car. It was safe; the residents had not found it yet. Still, he inspected the doors and windows and keyholes for jimmy marks, just to feel secure.
II
“WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?” Lynn asked as he opened the door to his apartment. She was sitting on the floor, her legs crossed, her panties showing—her favorite position, which always embarrassed Rodney when they relaxed with other people. He suspected that she did it on purpose. He had developed the habit of glancing at all the other fellows in a room, whenever she did it, until they saw him watching them discovering her and directed their eyes elsewhere in silent respect for his unexpressed wish. This always made Rodney feel superior and polished.
“Put your legs down,” he told her.
“For what?” she said.
“You’ll catch cold.”
“Nobody’s looking. Where you been?”
Rodney stood over her and looked down. He looked severe. He could not stand irritation at home too. “Go sit on the sofa,” he ordered her. “Only white girls expose themselves in public.”
“You prude,” she said. “This isn’t public.” But she got up anyway and reclined on the sofa.
“That’s better,” said Rodney, pulling off his coat. “If sitting like that is your thing, you should put it in a separate bag and bury it someplace.”
“What do you know about my thing?” Lynn said.
Rodney did not answer her.
“Where you been, bay-bee?”
Rodney said nothing. He hated her when she called him that in private.
“We’re going to be late for dinner, bay-bee,” she said again.
“I’ve been out studying,” Rodney finally said.
“What?”
“Things.”
“Today’s Saturday.”
“So? God made Saturdays for students.”
“Crap,” she said. Then she added: “Bay-bee!”
“Oh, shut up,” said Rodney.
“You can give me orders when we’re married,” said Lynn.
“That’ll be the day,” Rodney muttered.
“Yeah,” Lynn repeated. “That’ll be the day.”
Rodney looked at her, legs miniskirted but sufficiently covered, hair natural but just a little too straight to be that way, skin nut-brown and smooth and soft to touch and feel against his mouth and arms and legs, body well built and filled, very noticeable breasts and hips, also good to touch and feel against his body at night. Rodney liked to make love at night, in the dark. He especially did not like to make sounds while making love, although he felt uneasy if the girl did not make any. He was considering whether or not it was dark enough in the room to make love when the telephone rang. Lynn did not move on the sofa and so he answered it himself. It was Charlie Pratt.
“What’s happening, baby?” said Rodney.
“Not much,” said Charlie. “Listen, can you make dinner around seven? We got some other cats coming over at nine we don’t want to feed nothin’ but beer.”
“Cool,” said Rodney. He looked at his watch. “We can make it as soon as Lynn gets herself together.” He glanced over at Lynn still stretched out on the sofa.
“Great,” said Charlie Pratt. “Later.”
Rodney hung up. “What do you have to do to get ready?” he asked Lynn.
“Nothing.”
“You could put on another skirt.”
“Go to hell,” she said, not lifting her head from the sofa. “This skirt’s fine.”
“You could at least comb your hair or something.”
Lynn ignored him. Rodney began to reconsider the sufficiency of the darkness in the room. Then he thought better of the idea. Instead, he went out of the room to shave and take a bath.
These days Rodney found himself coming close to hating everyone. Still, he never allowed himself to recognize it, or call what he felt toward certain people genuine hate. He preferred to call it differing degrees of dislike, an emotion with two sides like a coin, which was constantly spinning in his mind. Sometimes it landed, in his brain, heads up, signifying a certain affinity; sometimes it landed tails up, signifying a slight distaste or perhaps a major objection to a single person and his attitudes. He refused to dislike absolutely because, he felt, dislike was uncomfortably close to bigotry and Rodney knew too many different people to be a practicing bigot. Sometimes, very frequently in fact, he disliked Willie immensely. On the other hand, he sometimes felt a bit of admiration for the fellow and, occasionally, footnoted that admiration by purchasing an extra beer for him. This gesture served to stamp those rare moments onto his memory, a reminder that, because he had done this on enough occasions in the past, there would always be a rather thick prophylactic between how he really felt and how Willie assumed he felt.
Talking to Willie was informative and amusing to Rodney up to the point when Willie began to smile and to seem to know that what he was telling Rodney had some value. After he could see when that point was reached in Willie’s face, Rodney was not amused any more. Sometimes he was annoyed and sometimes, when Willie smiled confidently and knowledgeably and condescendingly, Rodney began to almost hate him. He felt the same about Lynn and her panties and her bay-bee and the loose ways she had, Rodney assumed, picked up from living among whites for too long. Sometimes she made him feel really uncomfortable and scared. He began to say bay-bee, bay-bee to himself in the shower. Thinking about it, he suddenly realized that he felt exactly the same way about Charlie Pratt.
Pratt made Rodney feel uncomfortable because he did not fit either side of the coin. The fellow had well over two thousand records: some rhythm and blues, some jazz, some folk, some gospels, but all black. And Charlie Pratt was not. He knew the language and was proud to use the vocabulary Rodney had been trying to forget all his life. He was pleasantly chubby with dark blond hair and a fuzzy Genghis Khan moustache which hung down on either side of his chin. Sometimes the ends dangled when he moved. And sometimes Pratt dangled when he moved. Sometimes Charlie Pratt, his belly hanging over his belt and his chin going up and down in talk, dangled when he did not move. Drying his legs with a towel, Rodney thought of himself and Charlie locked in mortal combat. Rodney had no doubt that he would win; he was slim and wiry, he was quick, he had a history of natural selection in his ancestry. Besides, Charlie was fat. He never used his body. Thinking about him, Rodney realized that he had never seen Charlie dance or move to the rhythm of any one of his two thousand records. He had never seen him snap his fingers once, or voluntarily move any part of his body besides his arms and legs; and even these movements were not rhythmic but something close to an unnatural shuffle.
Rodney did a quick step with his feet as he brushed his teeth in front of the mirror. He moved back from the mirror in order to see his feet. He did the step again, grinning at himself and at the white-foamed toothbrush hanging loosely from his mouth. The foam covered his lips and made them white, and, remembering a fast song in his head, Rodney snapped his fingers and did the step again. And again.
III
“WHEN YOU FINISH,” said Charlie Pratt in between chews on a pork-chop bone, “I’ll let you hear some of the stuff I picked up yesterday.”
Rodney wiped his mouth carefully before answering. “What’d you get this time?” he asked, knowing what to expect.
“Some vintage Roscoe and Shirley stuff,” said Charlie. “We found it in Markfield’s back room. It was just lying there under a stack of oldies full of dust. We figure it must be their only LP. Jesus, what a find!” Both Charlie and his wife smiled pridefully.
“How about that,” said Rodney. But he did not say it with enthusiasm.
Charlie stood up from the table and began to shift his bulk from foot to foot, a sort of safe dance, but more like the movements of someone who wants desperately to go to the bathroom.
“Whatever happened to them?” asked Lynn.
Both the Pratts smiled together. “They broke up in ’52 because the girl was a lesbian,” his wife said. She had gone to Vassar, and Rodney always noticed how small and tight her mouth became whenever she took the initiative from her husband, which was, Rodney had noticed over a period of several dinners and many beer parties with them, very, very often. She was aggressive, in keeping with the Vassar tradition, and seemed to play a very intense, continuous game of one-upmanship with her husband.
“That’s not what happened at all,” her husband said. “After they hit the big time with ‘I Want to Do It,’ it was in ’53, Roscoe started sleeping around. One night she caught him in a hotel room with a chick and razored his face. His face was so cut up he couldn’t go onstage any more. I saw him in Newark in ’64 when he was trying to make a comeback. He still looked razored. He looked bad.”
Rodney felt tight inside, remembering that in ’64 he had been trying desperately to make up for a lifetime of not knowing anything about Baroque. Now he knew all about it and he had never heard of Roscoe and Shirley. “There was an ‘I Remember Rock ’n Roll’ Memorial in Cleveland last week,” he said.
“Yeah,” said Charlie. “Too bad Fatso couldn’t make it. But that was one hell of a song Dirty Rivers made up. Jesus, right on the spot too! Jesus, right on the stage! He sang for almost two hours. Christ! I was lucky to get it taped, the cats went wild. They almost overran the stage.”
“How did you get the tape?” asked Rodney, now vaguely disgusted.
“We knew about the show for months,” Peggy Pratt broke in. “We planned to go but there was an Ashy Williamson Revue in the Village that same night. We couldn’t make both so we called up this guy in Cleveland and got him to tape the show for us.” She paused. “Want to hear it?”
“No,” said Rodney, somewhat flatly. Then he added: “Not right now.”
“Want to hear the Roscoe and Shirley?”
“No.”
“I got a new Baptist group,” said Charlie Pratt. “Some new freedom songs. Lots of finger-poppin’ and hand jive.”
“That’s not my stick,” said Rodney.
“You mean that ain’t your thing,” said Charlie.
“Yeah,” said Rodney. “That’s what I mean.”
IV
THEY WERE DRINKING BEER and listening to the Dirty Rivers tape when the other people came in. Rodney had been sitting on the sofa, quietly, too heavy to keep time with his feet and too tight inside to care if the Pratts did. Lynn was in her best position, on the floor, cross-legged. The two girls with names he did not catch sat in chairs and crossed their legs, keeping time to the music and smoking. Looking at Lynn on the floor and looking at them on the chairs made Rodney mad. Listening to the Pratts recount, to the two white fellows, how they got the Cleveland tape made Rodney mad too. He drained his beer can and then began to beat time to the music with his foot and both hands on the arm of the sofa with a heavy, controlled deliberation that was really off the beat. Still, he knew that, since he was the only black male in the room, the others would assume that he alone knew the proper beat, even if it was out of time with their own perception of it, and would follow him. The two bearded fellows did just that when they sat down on the floor with Lynn; but the two girls maintained their original perception of the beat. Nevertheless, watching the fellows, Rodney felt the return of some sense of power.
“Some more suds,” he said to Peggy Pratt.
She went out of the room.
“You’ve had enough,” said Lynn.
Rodney looked at her spitefully. “Just be cool,” he told her. “You just play your own game and stay cool.”
The two girls looked at him and smiled. Their dates looked at Lynn. They did not smile. Dirty Rivers was moaning, “Help me! Help me! Help me!” now, and Rodney felt that he had to feel more from the music than any of them. “Mercy! Mercy! Mercy!” he exclaimed as Peggy Pratt handed him another can of beer. “This cat is together!”
The girls agreed and smiled again. One of them even reconciled her beat to Rodney’s. Lynn just looked at him.
“He’s just a beautiful man,” the reconciled girl said.
“He’s got more soul than anybody,” said Rodney. “Nobody can touch him.” He got up from the sofa, put his hands in his pockets and began to exercise a slow, heavy grind to the music without moving his feet. Charlie, who had been standing by the recorder all this time with his hands locked together, smiled his Genghis Khan smile. “Actually,” he said rather slowly, “I think Ashy Williamson is better.”
“You jivetime cat,” said Rodney. “Williamson couldn’t touch Dirty Rivers with a stick.”
“Rivers couldn’t adapt,” said Charlie.
“What do you mean?”
“He’s just an old man now, playing the toilets, doing his same thing. Williamson’s got class. He’s got a new sound everybody digs. Even the squares.”
“What do you know?” said Rodney.
Charlie Pratt smiled. “Plenty,” he said.
After more beer and argument all around, and after playing Williamson’s oldest and latest LP’s by way of proof, it was decided that they should put it to a vote. Both the Pratts were of the same mind: Ashy Williamson was better than Dirty Rivers. The two fellows on the floor agreed with them. And also one of the girls. The other girl, however, the skinny brunette who had reconciled her beat to Rodney’s, observed that she had been raised on Rivers and felt, absolutely, that he had had in the past, and still had now, a very good thing going for him. But Rodney was not impressed. She had crooked teeth and was obviously out to flatter her date with her maintenance of an independent mind in spite of her looks. Rodney turned to Lynn, still sitting cross-legged and exposed on the floor, but saving Rodney from utilizing his cautioning eye by having the beer can conveniently placed between her open legs. “Well, what do you say?” he asked, standing over her in his usual way.
She looked up at him. Casually sipping her beer, she considered for a long moment. The room was now very quiet, the last cut having been played on the Williamson record. The only sound was Lynn sipping her beer. It grated in Rodney’s mind. The only movement was Charlie Pratt doing his rubber shift from foot to foot. That also irritated Rodney. “Well?” he said.
Lynn placed the can between her legs again, very carefully and neatly. “Dirty Rivers is an old man,” she said.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“He’s got nothing new going for him, bay-bee,” she said in a way that told Rodney she had made up her mind about it long before her opinion had been asked. She looked up at Rodney, her face resolved and, it seemed to him, slightly victorious.
“There you go, mother,” Charlie said.
Rodney could see them all smiling at him, even Lynn, even the ugly brunette who had reconciled. He sat down on the sofa and said nothing.
“Now I’ll play my new Roscoe and Shirley for you,” Charlie told the others.
“Wasn’t she a lesbian?” one of the fellows asked.
“Absolutely not!” said Charlie Pratt.
Rodney was flipping the coin in his mind again now. He flipped it faster and faster. After a while it was spinning against Willie and the cigar-chewing bartender and Lynn and especially the Pratts. Finishing the beer, Rodney found that the coin had stopped spinning; and from where his mind hung on the bad side of it, somewhere close to the place where he kept his bigotry almost locked away, he could hear the Pratts battling back and forth for the right to tell the others about a famous movie star who sued her parents when she found out that she was a mulatto. He got to his feet and walked over to the stacks and stacks of records that lined the wall. Aimlessly going through them, he considered all the black faces on their covers and all the slick, praising language by white disc jockeys and white experts and white managers on their backs. Then he commenced to stare at the brunette who had agreed with him. She avoided his eyes. He stared at Lynn too; but she was looking at Charlie Pratt, very intentionally. Only once did she glance up at him and smiled in a way that said “bay-bee.” And then she looked away again.
Rodney leaned against the wall of records, put his hands in his pockets and wet his lips. Then he said: “Little Tommy Tucker was a bad motherfucker!”
They all looked up at him.
“What?” said Peggy Pratt, smiling.
He repeated it.
V
DRIVING HOME, Rodney went slower than required and obeyed traffic signals on very quiet, very empty streets. Lynn sat against the door, away from him. She had her legs crossed.
“You were pretty good tonight,” she said at last.
Rodney was looking at a traffic light changing back to red.
“You were the life of the party.”
Rodney inspected a white line of bird shit running down the top of the window, between him and the red light. It would have to come off in the morning.
“I knew you would let that color come through if you had enough beer,” Lynn said.
“Oh shut the hell up!” said Rodney. He was not mad. She had just interrupted his thinking. He was thinking of going over to buy some more beer for Willie and talk some more before the usual Saturday time. He was thinking about building up his collection of Ashy Williamson LP’s. He was thinking about driving Lynn directly home and not going up with her to make love to her in her bed, which was much wider than his own, no matter how much she apologized later and no matter how dark and safe and inviting her room would be.