Midnight Page 4

  “It’s for me; I’ll take it in the bedroom.”

  “Talk as long as you want to, but be careful; may not be none left when you get back.”

  Justine.… “So, I mean, hey, like what’s happenin’, mister man? I know you gettin’ ready to go off to Afric-co ’n shit, but you could’ve call me. I mean, after all, I’m s’posed to be the woman in yo’ life; ain’t that what you lied ’n told me last month?”

  Bop took a final swallow of his well chewed catfish. Justine was really fucked up. She had finally sucked the pipe all the way in.

  “Well hey, what the fuck you gon’ say to me? I’m s’posed to be the woman you looove ’n shit, huh?

  “Justine, lissen to me, baby.…”

  He heard hysteria erupt. “Goddamnit, Bop, why you have to leave me, huh? I thought you told me you loved me ’n shit! And now you carryin’ yo’ ass off to some foreign country. Why you treatin’ me like this, huh? huh?!”

  Bop felt the cold rush of the crack-pipe logic echo through Justine’s emotional outburst.

  “Justine, I’m only gonna be gone a month, baby; I’ll be back.”

  More hysteria.… “You lyin’ to me, Bop; you tellin’ me a motherfuckin’ lie ’n you know it! You gonna git over there, start fuckin’ them Afric-co women ’n forget all about me.…”

  “Justine, I love you, baby.”

  He gently replaced the receiver in its cradle, there was no sense trying to make sense to Justine when she was high.

  Predictably, she called back ten seconds later. “Bop! Don’t hang up on me!!”

  “Justine, I’ll write you, OK?” He put the phone down with more force, thought about it for a second, and took the phone off the hook.

  Uncle David and Aunt Lulu never received more than four calls a week, and they could care less whether the phone was on or off the hook.

  5:15 P.M. He took immediate note of how far the catfish pile had gone down in his absence. “Anything left for a catfish-lovin’ man?”

  “Shit, we thought you wanted to go in there ’n eat the phone; we didn’t know you wanted catfish.”

  Salt-of-the-earth people. They showered love all over him, fillets full of it. He returned to the feast, determined to do justice to Aunt Lu’s catfish fry.

  “We got a surprise for you. Bop, soon as you finish eating.”

  How could you finish eating at Uncle David and Lulu’s house?

  6:15 P.M. Catfish bones everywhere. Bop waddled into the front room, remoted the TV on from sheer habit. “Well, Pam, whaddaya think, the peak of the riot seems to have withered. We appear to be back on the road to some kind of normalcy here; what do you think?”

  The arrogance of these motherfuckers! Let’s go back to where we were.

  Chester Simmons had done a masterwork job of laying the shit out for him.

  “Bop, my boy, you’ve gotta understand how the media works, if you want to understand how America functions. That’s a bottom line here.…”

  Flick. Click.

  “Bop?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How do you like it?”

  She handed the watch case to him under her husband’s approving eyes. The watch face carried the outlined shape of Africa in red, black, and green; black leather band, too nice.

  “Wowww!”

  “We thought you’d like to keep African time in Africa.”

  Uncle David sounded almost solemn.

  “Aunt Lu, Uncle David, I really want to thank you all for.…”

  Uncle David cut his sentimentality off. He often said, “I can’t stand all that drippy shit. People should do what they wanna do for other people ’cause they wanna do it; we shouldn’t expect nobody to be moanin’ ’n shit to each other.” “Uhh, you all set, you got all your papers ’n stuff?”

  “I got all that packed in my carry-on bag.”

  “You got a good supply of rubbers?”

  Good ol’ down to earth Aunt Lu.

  “Uhhh, yeah, Aunt Lu’, I got enough.”

  “Awright then, let’s break open this bottle of Co-vos-see-A and have a farewell drink. We ain’t got none of that maiy-jew-wanna you be sneakin’ round here smokin’.”

  They shared a laugh. Cognac? Wowww.… Uncle David and Aunt Lulu usually reserved their drinkin’ for those evenings they went for dinner on the pier. The drinkin’ was usually one whisky sour each.

  “Well, Bop, here’s to a good trip.”

  “Thanks, Aunt Lu.”

  “You sure you got enough rubbers?”

  “Bop ain’t gon’ be over there but a month; how much stank you think he can get into in that length of time?”

  3

  He felt as though he were in a drunken bubble, flying across the Atlantic. Uncle David and Aunt Lulu had poured themselves a small taste each and filled a wineglass with cognac for him.

  “Catfish ’n corn-gnac, now that’s what I call good livin’.”

  “Would you care for a cocktail, sah?”

  “Uhh, yeah, how about a couple bottles of that cognac?”

  The stewardesses seemed to roam the aisles with liquor. They must be trying to keep people cooled out.

  He made an oblique study of the German woman in the seat next to him and of her ten-year-old son gazing out of the window at clouds, endless clouds.

  There’s a whole fuckin’ ocean down there somewhere.

  He unscrewed the cap from the cognac bottle, ignored the glass on the tray in front of him, and sipped. The German woman smiled his way.

  Ain’t no need to be smiling at white women in a plane going to the continent.

  After the second bottle of cognac, he once again obliquely took in his fellow passengers. Lots of Indians, or Pakistingos, or whatever the fuck they call themselves. A few offball whites, like the German woman, and quite a few Africans, quite a few.

  They were scheduled for an overnight stay in London (landing at Heathrow and departing from Gatwick) and on to a half-hour stop in Kano, Nigeria, and onward to Atoka (Kotoka airport) in Accra.

  He nodded off like an old-fashioned heroin addict every hour or so, buzzed on cognac, bored to tears after hours of sitting in one place, recalling.…

  “Skateboard, Bone, Big Fool, I don’t want anybody shootin’ on this one. OK?”

  “Can’t we at least fire a few rounds in the air? I mean, c’mon now, Bop, what the fuck we got uzis for?”

  “Yeahh, go ’head, if it’s gonna make you happy.”

  Gang banging. Territorial madness compounded by drugs. Crossfires, babies getting shot up. He pulled up out of his nod at the thought. Babies getting shot up.

  “Bone, I’m turnin’ it in, man. I’ve had enough.”

  “I can’t remember nobody ever leavin’ the Bricks, home …, not alive anyway.”

  Two hundred and forty three Bricks met to determine Bop’s fate. They gave him a chance to cop a plea before casting ballots, marble-sized bricks, in a box.

  “I don’t really care what ya’ll do with me. I know what I wanna do with myself. I want out. I ain’t mad at nobody; I still feel like the greatest motherfucker in the world is a Brick, but I want out.”

  An unruly element, loaded on Old English 800 and herb, wanted to skip the vote and just take him out on the spot. “You jive-ass punk! We thought you had some heart, nigger!”

  “Yeah! I have got some heart! I got enough heart to do what I’m doing! Motherfucker!”

  The vote was one hundred and three against, one hundred and forty for.

  Big Fool put it into words: “You was a Brick, you a Brick now, and you always gon’ be a Brick. If we thought otherwise we’d stomp your ass to death in the middle of Figueroa and Imperial.”

  He was given the status of “Original Brick” and allowed to turn it in. The unruly element didn’t like the decision but was compelled to obey Brick law. “What happens if somebody else decides that they want out? What’s gon’ happen to the organization if motherfuckers can just come ’n go when they want to?!”

&nbs
p; “Shut the fuck up, Kinney Mac! We the Bricks, OK? We’ve made a decision by vote and that’s what we gonna stick by. OK? What that means is that ain’t nobody gon’ fuck with Bop period. OK?”

  Sweet people, Uncle David and Aunt Lulu. “Well, you done been everywhere, including jail, so why not stay here?”

  Work? Never had a job. Never really knew what a job was. “A job is where a dumb motherfucker gets stupid and receives an hourly wage for it,” Chester Simmons.

  Damn, how long is their damn thing gon’ be in the air? We must be outta gas by now. He nodded off again, lulled by the drone of the plane.

  “Fuck ’im up, Bop! Fuck ’im up!”

  Clyde “Bop Daddy” Johnson, a heavy hitter. “I don’t need nothin’ in my hand but my fists. I can take a chump out!”

  Gang bangin’, the survivalistic fear of being killed. Of fractured skull. Damn that hurt! A motherfucker slinging a tire iron upside your head can hurt a whole lot. The right ankle that ached in damp weather, fractured by a baseball bat. Penal institutions (“facilities”) for the past eleven years, on and off. Being shot. Ex-drug-addict/pusher.

  The dream-memory woke him up. Ex-War Lord Counselor of the Bricks, one of the biggest, best organized and most brutal of the “EL-A” gangs.

  “We are Bricks; think about it.”

  A Brick. Bop took a slow pan of the people on the plane. Wonder how many of them has any idea what a Brick is? Twenty-one years old and I feel like I’m fifty-one; that’s one of the things being a Brick will do for you, age you fast.

  Africa. Ghana. “Bop, lemme tell you something. Most of these funky chumps in this joint might be the descendants of warriors, kings and queens, royalty. Take a look at BoBo over there. You don’t get faces like that unless your genetic bag has been pretty much left undisturbed. And Wadee, check him out. Now tell me that brother ain’t Masai and I’ll kiss you on both cheeks.

  “That’s one of the things you gonna really trip on when you get over there. We got that wicked white blood runnin’ through us, and oh yeahhh, you’ll see it over there too. The Europeans, men and women, have been fuckin’ everybody for a long time. You’ll see people looking like sticks of charcoal who’ll be looking at you funny.

  “The thing you’ll notice about us is that we got all this Indian blood up in us that nobody talks about, except for a Jewish guy named Katz. Writes books about black Indians. I can see a whole bunch o’ red men in your face.”

  He rubbed his cheekbones absently. Funny, that was something that everybody joked about.

  “Y’all better be careful now ’n don’t make Marivina mad; she’s apt to whip that scalpin’ knife out on you!”

  Yeahhh, Mom had the Indian side and Dad did too, judging from family photos.

  “And who is that, daddy, with the long hair?”

  “That’s my father’s father, your great grandfather, Wiley Johnson.”

  “Why is his hair long like that?”

  “That’s the way he wore his hair when it wasn’t braided. He was a Choctaw Indian who stole your great grandmother away from a plantation and married her.”

  No one seemed to know or care about who the European ancestors had been. “They was just a bunch of ragdog motherfuckers; who cares who they were?”

  Damn, this is a long fuck’n ride. He peeked over at the German woman slumped to his right and her son. My ancestors? He pulled one of the small bottles of cognac out of his jacket pocket, took a fierce nip.

  The idea of being so far above the ocean made him tremble for a second. He looked around to see if anyone had noticed. What would they think, seeing a Brick shiver with fear, even an ex-Brick?

  What’s this crazy shit going through my head? Most of the passengers were asleep, a few were reading, some having lazy conversations. No one had taken note of his fearful moment.

  Well, Chester, you ol’ slick-assed motherfucker you, you’ve conned me into making a trip to somewhere I never would’ve thought about going on my own. Ain’t no turnin’ this baby around, that’s for damned sho’.

  Five minutes later he was lulled back into a fetal nod.

  “Beg for your life, nigger; this is the night we gon’ kill yo’ ass!”

  “Suck my dick!”

  Bam!

  He groaned from the memory of the pain of the bullet boring into his body. The heroin-cocaine-codeine-wino days.

  “Damn, Bop, we thought you was a strong brother; never thought we’d see you shoot yourself through that kind of grease!”

  How long did it last? A year and a half, two years and a half? Am I past it? Thank God I didn’t go for the pipe. That pipe is a monster and the latest shit that is supposed to be colder than “ice.”

  Chester has got to be right about the drug scene.

  “Wake up, youngblood! Don’t you know they use African-American—no, let me correct that—they use black neighborhoods for drug experiments. They can’t get into African-American neighborhoods with that funky shit. You understand what I’m saying?”

  He looked out of the porthole, surprised to see dawn coming on. Wowww! I’m getting all turned around. That’s right, sun rises in the east, sets in the west. He felt slightly gunky in the crotch and his mouth had the sour taste of all-night sipping.

  “Ahhh, I see we’re coming into England,” the German woman yawned and nodded at the ground below.

  Bop looked out onto cold gray fields.

  After the police passed off from the plane, he had to smile at the way things were done. It was a little like jail. Place your bags here, open that, show me your this, let me stamp that, etc., etc.

  He was simply taking it all in, not clearly understanding a word anybody was saying to him.

  “Ah sah, there seam t’bay a slought discrepancy in your i-tenerary, you shan’t be able to de-plane ’til tomorrow. Next flight for Ghana.”

  “Uhh, what’s that mean?”

  “You simply take this document to the Excelsior Hotel and you will be given accommodations—next phlease?”

  The fog was lifting; it was survival time. He edged away from the ticket desk, calmly searching for an intelligent face that he could trust.

  A cop—what do they call them here?—a bobby was smiling at him. He threw a tentative smile back. The bobby strolled over to him without hesitation.

  “Can I help you, sah? You seem to be in a bit of a snit.”

  A smiling English cop was trying to help him out. Wowww.… “a bit of a snit.”

  It took all of five minutes for the cop to unravel the mysteries, which bus to get on to get to the hotel, what time to get up to catch the morning bus to Gatwick airport, the whole nine yards.

  “Thanks, uhhh officer. Appreciate it.”

  “Glad to be of service, sah.”

  The bobby flicked a polite salute off and stepped away to deal with the next wayward traveler.

  “Everything is in proper order, sah. Bellman!”

  England. He was beginning to like the way they said, “sah.”

  “Yes, sah.”

  “No, sah.”

  “Not quite, sah.”

  “Sahh.”

  “Here we are, sah, room 315. Hope you have a comfortable stay hare, sah.”

  “Look, I’m hungry and I’d like to have a little taste. You think that could be arranged?”

  “Certainly, sah, simply put in a call to room service.”

  “Oh, yeah, cool. Here ya go.”

  He gave the man a dollar bill, not knowing whether it was a big tip or not. Fuck it, it’s a dollar.

  An hour later he sprawled out on his bed, belly plumped out on a medium-sized pizza and two Guinness stouts.

  England. He gazed out of the window, a gray light glowing dully through the Irish lace curtains. England. What the hell am I doing in England? Why do I have to go to England to get to Ghana?

  “What you have to keep in mind, Bop, is that a lot of colonial residue is still floating around out there; be prepared to deal with it.”

  “But, Che
ster, look, man, I thought you said the colonial powers had been kicked out?”

  “Physically they’ve been kicked out but mentally they’re still there.”

  The afternoon was becoming grayer. Damn.… Here it is May 5th and it looks like it’s about to snow. He reached for the phone.

  “Room service? This is room 315; send me two more stouts up here.”

  “Right away, sah.”

  Nothing to do, a whole night to trip on, in London, England. Well, just on the outskirts of London anyway. Bop furtively pulled his suitcase out of the closet, placed it flat on the bed, and lifted the false bottom under his shirts. Eight thousand in one hundred and five hundred dollar bills, and so far no one had said a mumbling word about the possibility of him hiding money. No one had told him that it was illegal to be in possession of eight thousand drug-earned dollars, he just simply felt it was the right thing to do, conceal. Knock-knock-discreet-knock.

  “You ordered two Guinness stouts, sah?”

  “Yeah, put ’em on the dresser. Here you go.”

  “Thank you, sah.”

  Another dollar, that same neutral expression.

  “Will that be all, sah?”

  “Yeah, that’s all.”

  The man left with a slight smirk on his face, or so Bop imagined. What the hell, who cares what he thinks? He strolled around the room, sipping his Guinness, decided to take a shower.

  Sprawled out on the bed after a hot shower, a towel saronged around his waist, the last Guinness in hand, Bop stared at the deep blue lights of a cool English May evening.

  That was really dumb of me not to let Justine come on over and give me a little good-bye sugar. Justine, Frances, Annette, Margaret, Justine, Justine.… He kept coming back to Justine.

  Why would she have to suck on the pipe? A little nagging voice screamed at him: You gave her the pipe! You gave her the pipe! You! You! You …!

  He gulped a swallow of Guinness and washed it around in his mouth, trying to defend himself. Got crack everywhere; she didn’t have to do it.

  Frances, too fuckin’ educated. All she wanted to do was talk about books. And fuck. She was a book-fuckin’ freak.

  Annette wanted to get married. Well, why not? After three babies.…

  Margaret Kuykendall, black, beautiful, ambitious. “Bop, you know what I want? I want a helicopter so I won’t have to deal with this damned traffic everyday; it gets on my nerves.”