The Busting Out of an Ordinary Man Page 6

  Ed took a long pull on his beer, eyes shining, waiting for a mistake to happen that he could figure out.

  “So, along with equalizin’ things on the economic front, we should have a complete overthrow of the racial scheme of things, and I ain’t talkin’ about integration either. I think it would be stupid to try to legislate social habits. What we should have is a system that guarantees, absolutely guarantees the best woman or man the opportunity to do meaningful work, for a living wage; regardless of race.

  “That would settle a bunch of problems, if we could solve the white racial problem. I know we can’t solve it by killin’ all the white folks.”

  Lubertha stopped, her heart pumping faster. “Kwendi says that we ought to put groups of the best so-called minority group minds in Think-Do-Tanks for a month, dealin’ with each one of the problems we have here.”

  “Minority group minds?” Father Franklin asked, slightly worn down.

  “Uh huh, his thing is that the so-called majority group mind, the white mind, has so completely messed itself around that it will never be straightened out enough to deal with the problems they’ve created. If they’d been able to, once again, things wouldn’t be in the state they’re in today.”

  “So, you sayin’, you ’n Kwendi ’n him, that Negroes gon’ solve the country’s problems, huh?”

  “Right on! Chicanos, Indians, Asians, Blacks, us!” Lubertha’s intensity took her voice almost to the Club meeting level. Her father stared at her as though he were seeing his daughter for the first time.

  Mrs. Franklin shuffled into the kitchen, yawning, wandered past them sitting at the table like a sleepwalker and poured herself a glass of water from the cold water jug in the refrigerator. “You two gon’ sit up here boozin’ ’n flappin’ your jaws all night?” she asked, almost as an afterthought, as she shuffled back to bed.

  Father and daughter burst into broad grins as they watched her shambling departure.

  “Momma’s got a point, we both gotta get up tomorrow.”

  “Yeahhh,” Ed Franklin agreed sourly, crushing his beer can in his paw. “But we ain’t got to the end o’ this,” he reminded his daughter.

  “By no means!” she agreed, as she clicked off the kitchen light, the last one out, and headed wearily for her bedroom.

  Chapter 3

  Ways of Making Bread

  Arnold C., for Charles Mack, but better known as “Chili” to the dudes he had played high school basketball with, sprawled out in his king-sized bed, scratching his crotch with his left hand and reaching for the half smoked joint in the swan-shaped ashtray bedside, a token of last night’s doin’s, with the other hand.

  He lit the roach and took a deep hit. Wednesday, 12:15, what tune was she supposed to show up? 1:00 yawwwnnn, guess I better get up and freshen my ass up a lil’ taste.

  He slowly, reluctantly lowered his feet onto the pile carpet, sat on the side of the bed finishing off the dope and looked around his bedroom. Nice, nice, he thought, checking out the plushness of the deep red, charcoal black and velvet green of the interior.

  Yeahhhh, really nice a helluva long way from 42nd and Bowen Avenue, that’s for damned sho’!

  He burned his right thumb and forefinger slightly on the roach, dropped it in the ashtray and stood up to stretch his lean, even planed six-foot frame, loaded again.

  Shit, shower ’n shave. He strolled out of the bedroom heading for his modern gadgeted kitchen, pausing in the living room to open the drapes, to check out what the day was like. Brisk, wind sweeping in from the lake right around the corner, the Northside, only ten niggers in the whole block and three of them hooked up with white broads.

  Chili stood straddle-legged, both hands on his slender hips, looking down at the dull, blue-gray streets uhhh huhhh … he looked up from under his lids slyly, pinning the two women’s faces leering at him from the apartment across the street. Uhhh huhhh, that’s right, he nodded to them, what you see is what you get.

  They stared boldly at each other for a minute and then pretended that each one’s attention was drawn to something else.

  Chili slid away from the slit in the drapes, tired of the game, remembering that he wanted a snack.

  Bitches! Jive bitches! he muttered, jerking the refrigerator door open.

  How long had it been going on? he reflected, the standing-in-the-window-for-the-airline-stewardesses-naked-thing.

  Just after I got in here, he answered his thought, pulling out a box of chocolate chip cookies and a wedge of gruyere six, no, eight months of me exposing my dick to them crazy bitches, guess I’ll hold off for another month and then gon’ on over there and fuck everybody in the house, one by one.

  The thought caused him to have a semi-erection.

  Cynthia! damn!

  He snatched a couple cookies from the box and dropped the rest on the kitchen table, rushing to shower and shave, to be smelling good when his main lady, his banker, showed. A leisurely, warm, needle prick shower, a smooth, close shave, a dash of Canoe and the short trip back to the sack for another joint, a full length tuskie this time.

  He carefully arranged himself on top of the covers in his midnight blue, three-quarter length robe, head getting lighter with each hit.

  Damnit! he jerked himself into a sitting position, hopped off the bed mumbling, puffing furiously on the half-smoked joint as he hurried into the living room to put some music on. Leaning over his record racks, he tried to figure out what his mood for music was something swift by Hubert Laws? Some funky ’Trane? Miles’ New Directions? A lil’ of the Latin scene with Armando and Mongo? What?

  The cold hands over his eyes frightened him so badly for a second that he almost screamed. He recovered quickly, stood up slowly to get his nerves together and turned to face Cynthia Moore, the current sponsor of his lifestyle.

  “Cynthia,” he gritted his teeth and tried to look down in her face as meanly as possible, “I’m gon’ kick your ass one o’ these days, doin’ that kinda shit to me.”

  “Scare you?” she asked gaily, pecking him on the chin and tossing her full-length baby calfskin across a nearby chair.

  He looked at her tripping around the room, lighting a cigarette, tossing her ash blond, shoulder-length locks over her shoulder, Clairol style.

  “Nawww, you didn’t scare me, you damned near froze me to death with your cold ass hands,” he answered finally, turning away from the sparkling blue eyes, the fading Florida tan, the Norwegian turtleneck and the tailored slacks, to put some music on. He thumbed through the records, feeling, as usual, vaguely irritated that she had a key, a right she insisted on, under the circumstances.

  “Got any more of that good odor I smell?” she asked over his shoulder as he stuck Black Byrd on the turntable.

  “Yeah, look under the bed,” he said, placing his roach on the album cover. He watched her twist away to the bedroom as he went in the opposite way to the kitchen. Bitch must be richer ’n Carnation cream. He sliced a couple pieces of cheese and gobbled a couple cookies, stoking up to rap.

  “You don’t have any rolled?” she called out to him from the bedroom.

  “Bring it here!” he called back to her, making his voice sound harsher than he felt.

  She turned the corner of the kitchen holding the shoe box, half full of finely grated, stem-free, Laotian marijuana out to him sheepishly.

  “You know I just never seem to be able to roll a good joint.”

  “No, well, where I come from, if you couldn’t roll, you couldn’t smoke sit down and watch again.”

  Cynthia Moore, her Gloria Steinem glasses tilted provocatively on her aquiline nose, sat across from him at the kitchen table, her hands folded in her lap like a schoolgirl.

  Chili rolled a couple cigarette-sized joints, carefully, pausing at each point in the process to give her the benefit of his expertise. “Now, you do it,” he said to her, pushing the box over to her as he lit one.

  He sucked in deeply and blew a soft stream of smoke into her face as she
fumbled through the process. Bitch buys the best smoke in the world and don’t even know how to roll.

  Cynthia laughed self-consciously as her sloppily rolled effort fell apart. “Ohhh damnit! I just can’t get the hang of it! I guess you have better fingers for this stuff than I do.”

  “Don’t let it ruin your day,” he spoke softly to her and handed her his smoke. “No reason why you should be able to do everything good.” He watched her puff, knowing she’d be out there in three tokes. “Whatchu been doin’ with yourself all week?” he asked, slouching down to let his robe fall open slightly.

  She coughed a little of the smoke out, getting up to full lotus her legs under her on the chair.

  “Well, Monday I had classes, as you know, … yesterday Mother practically forced me to spend the day with her, visiting some perfectly dreadful friends of ours they have a son,” she paused cleverly, took another hit and passed it back to him, “that, well, they’ve been trying to make the marriage of the season out of for the last three years.”

  “This the dude with the three names?”

  “Yes,” she answered, and giggled at the thought … Mrs. Stanley Smyth-Frazier.

  Chili smiled cynically, watching her blue eyes glaze. “Why don’t you wanna get married to the dude, make the ahhemm marriage of the season?”

  Cynthia frowned and accepted the joint, “Don’t talk silly, Arnold, please!”

  “I’m sorry, baby,” he apologized lightly and leaned over to pat her thighs affectionately.

  “And you, what’ve you been doing?”

  Chili’s mind flashed on the Italian girl’s breasts that he had squeezed, mashed and sucked on Monday afternoon, knowing, praying that Cynthia wouldn’t come over, and she hadn’t shot to last night’s session with the Jewish hippie-artist bitch from the next block.

  “Well,” he started into his lie carefully, “I told you, at the restaurant Sunday, that I was gon’ check out that airlines reservation thing and I did, but all they seemed to be interested in is whether or not you served honorably in Vietnam.” He took the last short length of the joint from her fingers, sliding past everything else, knowing she wouldn’t probe too far, even if she was high, because that would make him angry, or sullen, or unaffectionate, or all three.

  For a year they had been playing this game, and both of them were so good at it by this time, so into where each of them was coming from, that there were seldom any slip-ups.

  Cynthia smiled lazily at him. They had an understanding. Black dudes were so groovy, especially dudes like Arnold “Chili,” … so full of fire and, at the same time, so helpless, it was like, like you really had to take care of them or they’d be completely lost.

  And that’s what she did; took care of him, financed his schemes, paid for the sporadic quarters he felt an urge to attend at the various universities around town, his rent, the clothes, his car … a noble experiment with a beautiful black animal. What would come out of it, eventually?

  Chili uncoiled himself from the chair and stood in front of her, the front of his shortie robe jutting out at her aggressively. How much better could it be? she asked herself, flushing slightly at the uninhibited sight of his erection.

  How much better could it be? she reached for his slender brown fingers, a submissive look in her eyes.

  Strolling toward the bedroom, arms swathed around each other’s waists, she flashed back to the roots of their relationship. Recently resigned from the city’s welfare police corps, meaning social work in the ghetto, at an interracial party with a girlfriend, head spaced from two exciting, eerie, weird, frightening, enlightening, erotic years working on the Southside, wondering whether or not it was going to be Europe or Brazil, resisting Mother’s insistent pleas that she become a member of the Junior League … “Now, Cynthia, … you must seriously consider it, for your future social position.”

  She had stood off to one side, her head bristling with thoughts, twenty-three years old, blond, well-to-do, … no, damnit! rich! and be damned, Dad always said

  “C’mon, baby … dance with me,” he had told her, rather than asked, and from there, for the last year, life had been Chili, confusion, fifty-minute sessions. “Don’t you see, Miss Moore? don’t you understand this need for self-injury?” sex, drugs “Cocaine, girl, cocaine,” excitement, games run, a rich fusion of feelings she had felt she was getting as a social worker, but didn’t amount to half of what Chili was giving her.

  And he was giving her a lot, she felt.

  “That ol’ smoke done got you fucked up, huh?” he smiled down at her, pulling her sweater up over her head.

  She smiled back, unable to speak, her thoughts sweeping her off to obscene feelings about his blackness, the fear and love she felt for him … like having your own personal ghetto, she thought, and giggled.

  “Yeahhh, you really fucked up,” Chili said, tossing her sweater into a corner, unpeeling his robe, giving her a show.

  Bitch sho’ has got a beautiful body.

  Chili crawled up into the center of the bed, his eyes pinched into slits from the effect of the herb and watched her unsnap her bra, wade out of her pants and panties.

  Bitch sho’ has got a beautiful body. I might dig her even if she didn’t have no money.

  He forced her to stand at the foot of the bed for a minute with a glance, the look appraising her tilted pink nipples, the lush indentation of the waist, the flared, milky thighs and the blond bush filling out the space between her legs like a golden triangle. “C’mere, white woman!” he called to her in a hard, low voice.

  Cynthia crawled up into bed beside him, shivering with anticipation. The dug their hands into each other’s hair with the first deep kiss, Cynthia moaning, lost already.

  Chili opened his eyes as they kissed, studied that lost expression and felt powerful.

  “Oohh, Chili Chili, God! you’re so good to me!”

  He looked up at the tip of her chin out of the corner of his eye, his mouth gorged with her pink nipple. You motherfuckin’ right I’m good to you, he thought, freaking her out with his lick in the navel technique.

  He situated himself in the position that would allow her feverish hands to grasp his joint.

  “Heyyyy, be gentle, the baby is awful tender,” he whispered up to her as he buried his full lips in her alabaster pussy. The clincher, he thought, swimming his head around between her thighs.

  “Oohhh, daddy! daddy! Ooooohhh, daddy! daddy daddy!”

  He had touched the money.

  A half-hour later, they nodded in each other’s arms, Cynthia surreptitiously breathing in Chili’s armpit funk, he playing with the long, wispy golden strands of her hair. In the darkened bedroom, far away from his Southside and her Otherside, they traded racial fantasies, turned on by white skin, black skin, pink nipples, black dick, straight hair, nappy hair, expensive perfume, undisguised black funk, different grooves.

  “Cynthia, you sleep?”

  “No,” she answered in a little girl’s voice.

  “Dig, … I don’t know if I told you or not, but I been havin’ a lil’ trouble with my ride, I may need a lil’ repair work.”

  “How much will it cost?”

  “Oohhh, three, four-hundred.”

  Cynthia sighed, recognizing the lie after all, the car had just had major work done less than a month ago.

  “Cynthia!?” he squirmed against her. “Did you hear me, baby?”

  “Yesss,” she answered quickly, “I heard you. I won’t have anything ’til Friday fathers can be awfully chickenshit sometimes.”

  He cuddled her closer, sympathetically, relating to her difficulties in life.

  Yeahhh, you’d have to be sympathetic to a bitch who got a grand a month for an allowance. Plenty sympathetic.…

  Taco McNeal beamed as she rushed into the house, her arms full of packages.

  “Hey, Taco! What is it, baby!” Leo Terry called out to her from the dining room card table.

  Slick Rina Dorsey, Taco’s roommate, hurried ove
r to help her with the groceries, leaving Leo, Jake the Fake and Harry Mathews at the table.

  “Will you look at what the wind blew in here?”

  “I see ’em, where you niggers been hidin’?”

  “Ain’t nobody been hidin’,” Jake the Fake answered smoothly, turning his hand down on the table. “I been incarcerated myself.”

  The group shared a laugh, warm memories linking them up.

  Harry winked at Leo before asking, “How in the hell did you manage to walk out with two bags of stuff?”

  Taco puffed her full bosom out and announced grandly, “By payin’ my hard-earned bread, that’s how.”

  The three men exchanged bewildered expressions.

  Jake, playing gun for the other two, “You mean to say you didn’t swipe none o’ that shit?”

  Taco pulled a quart-sized bottle of red wine out of one of the brown bags. “Nope, didn’t steal not one cookie, … well, I did get one thing for nothin’.” She pulled a package of six thinly sliced, loin chops out of her bra.

  The group burst into cheers, glad to see that she hadn’t completely reformed.

  “Yeah! that’s my baby!”

  “Right on, sister!”

  Slick Rina, laughing with the house, passed glasses around for the wine. Harry touched her behind casually with his open palm as she passed him. Slick smiled warmly at him, it had been close to a year now.

  Jake the Fake held up his glass for a toast. “Here’s to Taco and Slick, two of the downes’ sistahs that ever did it, two of the hippes’ ladies that it has ever been my purpose to meet and greet, two of.…”

  “Awww c’mon, Jake, let’s play cards … She ain’t gon’ give you none,” Leo Terry signified with him, hip to his long-standing crush on Taco.

  Jake lowered his glass, pissed at being exposed so ungraciously.

  “Yeah, let’s play some cards,” Taco seconded the motion.

  She settled into the seat next to Harry, snatched the deck, collected the cards everyone held, shuffled them and began to deal a whisk hand, as Rina prepared to kibitz.

  “What’s happenin’ to Chili these days?” Jake the Fake asked the general company, trying to bring himself up-to-date on members of their loosely knit fraternity.