Hanson and Libya are in bed together, comfortable now. Out on the Nimitz somewhere a fire truck honks and yodels, the neighborhood dogs howling along. A police helicopter clatters up out of the bay and thunders overhead, its spotlight slashing the windows.
“Tell me something you’ve never told anyone before,” Libya said.
He told her about the Vietnamese women with the water buffalo. How he would have killed them. What he was like back then.
“I almost died from shooting heroin,” she told him, her eyes glittering with the memory. “I was twenty,” she said, throwing one naked leg over his, arching her back.
“How…” Hanson began, looking at her, forgetting what he’d started to say, forgetting who he was now, all of it.
“Too late,” he said, “to call this off.”
“It was too late the first time I let you in the door.”
An hour later, still in bed, they’d been passing a joint back and forth, when Hanson said, “Something else I’ve never told anybody—I don’t think I have, not for twenty years, anyway, because I’d forgotten it myself all these years, till now. It’s not a secret, though, or a confession.”
“Let me get comfortable first,” Libya said, moving herself closer, “before you tell the story.”
“My junior year in high school I got a part-time evening job at the Holiday Inn in Greensboro. All the hotels and motels, restaurants, movie theatres, bathrooms, everything, was segregated, by law. But when I worked there—I don’t know why or who decided it—the Holiday Inn was where the black singing groups stayed, and the Holiday Inn was the nicest motel in town. It was a secret. If it had become common knowledge, white people would stop coming there. They’d have gone out of business. My mom had gone to high school with the manager, and that’s how I got the job. I was sixteen and looked like I was about twelve years old.
“My job there was mostly being the room service waiter, and, of course the groups ordered room service because the restaurants in town were segregated and mostly white anyway. After my high school classes, I’d go to the Holiday Inn, put on one of those white waiter smocks, and pretty soon the room service requests started coming in. These groups, Libya, were huge, Motown, people you heard on the radio every day, Top 40 artists: the Shirelles, the Marvelettes, the Chiffons, Patti LaBelle and the Bluebells, the best there were. They were stuck there before and after their shows, sort of sequestered there in the Holiday Inn, bored.
“I’d bring them five-dollar shrimp cocktails on those big phony silver platters with a big bell-shaped cover over them. Hamburgers. I’d bring them egg sandwiches on that huge platter that I rolled down the halls on a cart.
“I’d knock on the door, ‘room service.’ They’d kind of sing, ‘Come in,’ or the next time, ‘Come on in here, honey. We been waiting for you,’ and they’d be sitting on the edge of one of the twin beds, maybe four on a bed, in matching stage outfits, the whole group smiling at me as I came through the door. They teased me and made me blush. They were wonderful.
“The men who were on tour—these were the real guys too: Gary U.S. Bonds, the Isley Brothers, Junior Walker and the All Stars—I knew their music, sang their songs when I was alone. They were the best in the world. The guys would pay for the women’s setups—ice and mixer for the bottles they’d bought at a government-run Alcoholic Beverage Store, pay me from big rubber-banded flash rolls, twenties on top and one dollar bills mostly beneath.
“I remember I’d tell the women’s groups—they’re sitting on the edge of their bed—tell them how great they were, how I loved their music, them drinking straight rum from paper Dixie cups, and they’d say, ‘Thank you, baby.’”
Hanson laughed at the memory, happy in it, spread his hand out over Libya’s ribs, held her breast, lowered his head to hers and looked in her eyes and said, “‘Thank you, baby.’”