Deep Winter
If Time were an ocean then you would swim through everything all at once.
Five Years Before the
Fire Came
I
used to sit on my bed. Eyes fixed on Margaret. She would stand at the dresser
and slowly apply this dark red lipstick to her dark skin. She would touch her
hair every other moment. Pushing here. Pulling there. Maybe she might even pick
up the brush and run it the length that went all the way to her shoulders. All
of it was hers too. Not like Keisha whose mother let her get a weave for her
birthday last month. Oh, Margaret was so fine and she shined like a rainy
night, she was so dark. But not like a bad nigger black but this special black.
Like beautiful oil. Or the skin of a plum. When we would wrestle, I would bite
her fat smiling cheeks to see if they tasted like plums.
She
was getting perfect now for a date. She always looked perfect though. I would
sigh enviously, lovingly ashamed of my own ugliness compared to her. I don't
know how many times I sighed, maybe a million. Back then I was all skin and
bones and teeth with quick short, nappy hair and bad skin. Margaret was tall,
maybe just an inch more than me but she had hips and beautiful legs and not too
big titties. Mine were enormous. Disgusting, really.
She
would say in that sweet voice of hers, Sherl, your eyes'll fall out of your
pretty face if you keep staring at me, girl. Then she would smile. A perfect
smile. All white. Like the White girls on TV. My teeth were white but have this
glow of yellow to them no matter how hard I brushed. Daddy was always telling
me to brush harder.
I
would go over to her dresser, as she went to her closet for a scarf, and rub
some of that dark red lipstick into my cheeks like she did every once in a
while. I knew that Margaret was almost a full ten years older than me but I was
just as tall and one day (God, please hear me on this one) look as curvy and hot
as she did. I would look in the mirror on the dresser and marvel at the subtle
redness my dark cheeks now had, along with to all the pink bumps, looked like
craters. They called me Crater Face last year but they ain't nothing but
babies. The seventh grade would be different. I dared to think that maybe with
a hot comb through my peasy hair, some make-up and one titty for my two, I
might be as pretty as Margaret one day. It wasn't the first time that I'd
noticed it but it was the first time I thought it might not just be a silly
dream.
“You gotta go, Mar’?” I would ask her
every time in my whispering tone that rarely rose in happiness or joy,
excitement or pain. We lived in a good house where that wasn't allowed.
She'd
say, in that pretty almost-singing voice of hers, “Victor's a nice guy, baby.
He's got an okay job. He says he’ll start manager training soon. You know the
plan. I get married and we move out to Long Island or somewhere like that and
Daddy doesn't know where we are and we're----.”
Margaret
would pause and look somewhere deep inside herself then. Or maybe she was
looking outside of where we were. Back then the first thing she taught me was
not to get our hopes up too high since Momma was gone.
"Free,”
she would finally say and I would whisper it after her and taste the word. It
tasted dark and smooth and calm and sweet. Like her cheeks.
Free.
I would repeat it in bed at night, carefully. It was like a diamond to us that
I wanted to stare at then hide away. I wanted to just get lost in its facets, marvel
in its beauty and wonder if I could ever be part of that world. I didn't know
exactly where that world was but I think the White people on TV live there.
They live in Free. Where all things are beautiful. Where everyone is loved.
Margaret
would stare at me for a long, long time. Sometime, no feeling in her face, just
thoughts then she would smile and say, “We got time, baby, before Victor comes
to pick me up. Let's see if we can make you all pretty to go over to Mrs.
Jones's place.”
“Daddy will get mad again if he sees me
in your make-up. Like he did before,” I warned. My arm still sore from the
wrench he'd given it before Margaret stepped between us and shoved me toward my
room.
“So,” she said it just like she had that
other night. Strong but uncaring. Like she was remembering that he was our
Daddy so she just didn't say more. Bad girl words that only men can use. But
you could hear them words right after the so. I watched as my father and sister
stood toe-to-toe, eye-to-eye, in the living room. She was late coming in and
Mrs. Jones had brought me over and Daddy was mad and was screaming at me,
fixing to whip my ass, I guess. His big, thick hands all scrapey as he held my
arm and then Margaret's key was in the door and I tried to pull away and he
yanked me back and I screamed.
“Margaret,” I whined.
“You're late!”
“So.” Again.
Now
they stood so close I thought they could've kissed if he wasn't so mad and then
his hand came up so slow I thought Margaret had gone blind but she hadn't. She
just took the hit. My hit, I suppose. Margaret went down to the ground because
Daddy was a bus driver and the strongest man I've ever known but Margaret
proved herself then to be the strongest woman I've ever known. She rose, her
strength like a thunder that filled the whole room. She stood and brought
herself up to her full height and I swear, that was the first time I remember
noticing that she was taller than my Daddy. He looked at her, angry and then I
felt his anger change. I saw my Daddy get scared of Margaret. I saw him realize
something. I couldn't see what her face looked like but I heard her words.
"Don't
ever put your hands on me or Shirley as long as I live."
That
was all, no screaming, no raging, no fist fighting back. Just words. Just
thunder. I cried. How many times had he beat Momma until she was in the
hospital? They don’t do you any good there anyway. After the car accident they
could only put Momma into a pretty brown box and keep saying how sorry they
were and how lucky Daddy was. How lucky we were for having a God that spared
Daddy. From that night on, I knew that he hated her but we all knew that he
feared her.
I
loved her forever then. Forever. I loved her and wanted to be her and wanted to
eat her plum black skin and drink in that strength and love that she used to
stop him and love me. I loved her so hard, it hurt. My sister was all that I
ever loved. All that I suppose I ever will.
I HATE THAT UGLY BITCH NOW.
CHAPTER 1
In the years since his mother had died,
Steven had spent more time running from his father, trying to possess his own
grief. His father’s guilt was a predatory thing, incisors, into his son’s
thoughts ruining contact. Every conversation had the weight of a dirge. No
longer was it his mother that had died, his father, a gaping melancholy that
reeked of a man who’d realized the depth of his love and loss, a day too late.
Steven washed in the sink of a hotel,
the communal showers down the hallway. The room cheaper by a factor of ten of
what he could afford but this is what could pay for in cash. It wouldn’t take
long, a week at the most, before the family attorney, Donna Vos found him. It
had finally dawned on him a couple of years ago not to use either of the two
credit cards he’d had since he was fourteen. His passport though was what gave
him away. On impulse he’d dashed out of a sophomore class at NYU hailed a cab
and fourteen hours later was washing his face with the other side of the Atlantic.
He didn’t have much time. It was like a perverted game between the three of
them. If he didn’t know that the old bitch had made at least a million in
billable hours off of the Ross family, particularly Jason Ross’s art
collection/galleries and sundry real estate holdings and dealings. Steven just
wasn’t her drama, he was her albatross.
Steven counted his American money
carefully. Only a few thousand left from the cash he’d taken from ATMs in New
York and London. Purchasing a first class ticket to France had been costly.
Time was literally money. He clicked on his IPhone and started scrolling
through nearly a thousand names with associated details of friends,
acquaintances, and friends of friends. A network that he’d used for years to
dodge his father, school, and his own self sometimes. It was nearly a full-time
job keeping up with so many, attaching emails with itineraries---trying to
incorporate personal information, associated text messages so that when he
arrived, not exactly expected, he was at least informed, alert, aware of who
was married to whom.
When he woke up three days later in
what looked like a stateroom, he felt both better and worse. Curled up on a
yacht, under Frette sheets listening to a party rage overhead Steven
tried to imagine having somewhere to go, to be. What that would be like and
feel like. At least this time he was dressed he mused and in---Majorca?---he
was half sure. Only mildly drunk having stuck to wine and champagne---the heat
still enough to soak liquor through one’s brain until all the days were a blur.
A blur while making love to a woman.
She was as dark as tar, the contrast to Steven’s golden skin striking out at
him more than her touch. He recognized her face, her body undulating, she was a
model. She was trying too hard, he also noticed through the liquor blur.
The taste of coq au vin on the
end of a gold plated fork across from an actor who’d been in half a dozen
blockbusters was Steven’s next emergence from the blur. He sat listening, yes.
Comprehending, yes. But not even there, not even caring but moving on some sort
of autopilot. It seemed like the privileged were always content to assemble an
entourage of listeners. With a Rolex on one arm and a platinum ring and
bracelet set on the other they gave him entrance to their world. Being
exotically handsome, hair that went a brassy golden brown under the sun, skin
the color of lightly seared honey and eyes a crystalline green---they adored
him. Even when his words slurred on aged whiskey or a joint fell onto a twenty
thousand dollar couch---they adored him. And the adoration was the worst
narcotic because it seemed to have a reflected affect. It made them high on him
rather than raising his spirits. He would often watch people suddenly feel
better off of him without concern for his happiness. As if making him happy,
the effort, not the actual attainment was enough. Usually when projected
affection became sickening was when he drank more; inhaled deeper, fucked with
abandon to cast the incantation that brought back the blur.
His father’s hands were meaty---which
he’d always found odd for such a man of cautious, refined responsibilities.
There had come a time when a white man for a father struck Steven, he’d been
maybe nine or ten. When he could no longer ignore the difference to his eye or
those of others. When Steven’s hair was a seven inch high tangled jungle of
curls and frizz and his mother hooted, brushing it with products only she, not
the staff, knew where to buy. His hair a source of pride to her and shame to
his father. The times when she’d braided it, trails flowing down his back and
Jason Ross had chuckled at his child with both shame and curiosity. How to love
something so beautiful so deeply and know that Steven would have to give up his
self, literally pieces of his body to fit in. For a while eclectic was good, it
was delightful to watch a cherubic face but once the boy had gone from doughy
to angular, the Negroid had to go.
There was some sort of decision, some
sort of struggle between his parents and a few days later he’d been taken to a
barber and shorn. Whenever the dirt and the jungle returned it was obliterated
and his mother, Natalie looked upon him with the sadness of sacrifice. He
didn’t understood then what the sacrifice was until he’d realized she’d been
looking over the lip of Baccarat cut glass for years and wanted to always look
at him over Baccarat cut glass and not the options abstinence, rebellion itself
might breed. She’d borne all the blackness Jason’s world allotted her.
Holding his father’s hand in the cabin
of the private plane, he squeezed the meatiness of it. The heft of the pink and
beige hands always well-manicured, always calm and in control and he wondered
if all he was just a project for this man to rescue. Was Jason’s love just
about the ability to save his precious Natalie incarnate as a young man? Steven
curled up in the seat, his father reading a book with the hand that wasn’t
holding his son. An eye to the window, Europe becoming a blur, Steven rested
his head against the arm of the only constant he’d ever known and slept.
What could education offer when you
knew there was over twenty million in a trust fund for you? How could you
concentrate on geometry when your monthly credit limit was equal to a year’s
salary as an architect? How could you concentrate on what a teacher was saying
when a Porsche sat up the block waiting for you to speed out to Sag Harbor?
School only fascinated Steven as a hobby did. When it demanded too much he
would leave, he would wander, he would shop, he would party, and he would
search for the origin of the brown in his complexion that had left him an
exotically damning gold.
In Harlem, Steven skirted on the edges
of himself, of the origin of his flesh. He wandered into a block party late one
spring and learned to dance, learned that the drum beat in his blood, his hips,
his arms, his neck. Girls as big and thick as men surrounded him, gyrating and
undulating, eyes closed, braids flinging, jewelry clanging, lips good for
hot-love and soup cooling parted, jerking closer to him, into him, against him.
One woman put her hand on his shoulder and brought herself up onto one foot,
thrusting her pelvis at him in syncopation that threatened everything from his
clothes to his imperialism. Another woman, head wrap such a multi colored Kente
that the Bacardi 151 that they’d spiked with some fruit juice made her look
like there were swirls of colors coming from her head. Little men and women,
old and laughing, masked and without faces, armed and nude, danced on her head.
Steven watched in awe as the little
people skipped on the asphalt of the transformed playground, weaving between
the people, crawling up their legs. With every person, the mere touch of the
little delusions brought more spasming but this time in accordance to how the
little person had moved. A thin old man skipped through the people passing out
candy and smoking a cigar that smelled of fruit and coconut.
The drumbeats became thunderous, all
that mattered was the celebration of the beat and when the sky echoed thunder,
crackled lightning and cast down a light rain. A hundred people cheered,
roared, hailed the sky.
Another woman sidled up to Steven, her
hands traveling his body so freely that he squinted to see if he knew her
behind all of gold and dangling silver. She shook her head, sensing his
question and with a kiss too familiar for a stranger melted back into the
crowd. He threw back his head in revelation, in a memory of his mother talking
about his grandmother, Calys, about her strange ways, her beliefs.
The wave of people surrounded him, no
one specifically dancing with him but all of them in rhythm to him, slowly
moving him through them, each touching him. He gasped as he was heaved, thrust
out of the park and landed on his feet at the curb, initiated into his blood.
Teetering on the curb for eternity, he
contemplated the passing cars, the strolling people, the open and closed
stores, the screaming fire engines, the lit apartment windows, the lazy
suspicion of a passing police car, the offers of loose cigarettes, drugs,
clothing, cooling oils and warm pussy, and sighed. The exchange, the entrance
to the brown world seemed to be chaos, disorder, fear, and self-destruction.
And while the privilege that the lightener in his flesh brought him on the Real
World was diseased with its own dysfunction, it was cleaner. The Real World
contained education, possibility, money, art, glamour and the all-important,
largest differential, privilege.
Steven turned around, the playground
empty, perhaps they’d vanished a moment ago or hours, Bacardi didn’t allow for
temporal distinction. So be it. Steven stumbled to the parking lot where he’d
parked his Porsche under 24 hour watchful protection, mumbling the only word he
remembered from the song he’d been dancing to.
“Ashé.”
|
CHAPTER 2
|
Lil' Johnny (his daddy having been Big Johnny
but was now a Muslim known as Mu’min who lived in Africa) silently made his
bed. He slipped on the same old black corduroy pants and blue and red wool
sweater that he'd worn to school the day before; his winter clothes. The others
were dirty or had holes he didn’t know how to repair. He carefully took the
cold cereal down from the cabinet, Cassie didn't like when he made noise or
spilled stuff. She’d drilled in him a thousand times how she wanted him to keep
the apartment clean, tidy. It was his job to compensate where she couldn’t,
wouldn’t. He poured the cereal and then the last of the milk.
He gasped in disgust, it was sour then
nervously glanced at Cassie's sleeping figure to make sure she didn’t wake up
from her liquor aided slumber on the couch. He looked in the container for
lumps, which meant it was really bad. There weren't any. Shrugging, he poured
and hungrily ate one of the two meals he got for sure on weekdays, the others
served in the school cafeteria. He wasn’t allowed to seriously cook on the
stove and Cassie didn’t care to, fast food what they lived on most often.
Cassie groaned on the couch, a fifth of
scotch empty on the coffee table. Next to that, the dust left of cocaine and a
single rolled up dollar bill. A night spent in the bottle and of a high as she
tried desperately to make sense of insanity.
Johnny loving his mother through all
her pain and all the pain she inflicted on him so he made her a sandwich of
bologna and cheese and left it on the table between the dust and the bottle. He
carefully went to the closet and took twenty dollars out of her purse, he had
to go to the supermarket after school. Blessedly with Walker in the picture she
didn’t waste her own money on drugs, she’d tacitly assigned him a lot of the
household financial duties, she didn’t like handling money. Skipping into his
room, gleeful at his burden, he began wondering what to do about the phone bill
and rent due in a couple of weeks. He'd have to get her bank card and go to the
bank before school started on Friday when her paycheck came in. Before she had
a chance to get at it. They were behind two months in rent because of his
laziness in his responsibilities, she would remind him. She did night work at a
newspaper morgue and they only paid by direct deposit. She'd put her child in charge of taking care
of the money, getting it to where it should be before her appetites could
consume it.
There were good times, when Cassie was
being nice to him because he had done something, paid the lights, the rent, the
food on time so well. Those were the best times. Sometimes she would even play
with him or teach him African things from her stacks of books that lined the
bookcases in the living room. Then she would complain her head was hurting and
she'd have to go upstairs and play with Walker for a while.
Lil' Johnny quietly left the apartment,
passing by the elevator that hadn't worked in all the years that they'd lived
there and went into the stairwell. He clutched harder to Jacks. Quickly he
descended into the den full of the hooked, addicted, and lost. Jacks was with
him to help protect him. Jacks was good. The kids at school didn't see that
though. The kids made fun of him and Jacks. Lil' Johnny didn't care though, all
the days were the same for him since his father Big Johnny-now-Mu’min had left.
Silent and cold, a sour taste in his mouth that was his life.
Walker stared through the window, how
he could survive this? There had been so much that had threatened to separate
himself from this life, voluntarily, he no longer feared happenstance. There
was a point when pain and doubt and fear and anger built so that any reaction
to them simply ceased. It was the reaction, not the catalyzing emotion, that he
was truly experiencing or, in Walker’s case, learning to suppress. He was at a
point where his pain and fear of the upcoming summit meeting would either forge
something new or destroy the cast itself.Walker decided then to in a sense
become both victim and attacker. Born to a blind mother and a
father who refused to see him, anything but absolutes.How one became a drug
dealer he knew, was that it started in much the same way that the profession
was supported,people. In his third
year at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in between the inclination to
take the police test or go on to law school, Walker looked at his life and
realized that he knew a lot of people. He knew a lot about law and criminals.
He had a penchant for psychology, an understanding of the human mind. He was
people-smart.
Quiet moments back and forth to
college, on the D train to his parents’ home on Bainbridge Avenue in the Bronx,
brought him to the understanding that his pain was responsible for his gifts.
Having long been unseen by his parents because of their stellar lost (dead)
first child, Walker had grown up second, almost an only, lonely child. Now, in adulthood, definitely alone. His
mother’s sighted hands and his father a forging tool of DuBois inspired racial
advancement that got his brother down South to Lincoln, rebuked Walker’s adult
intellectual meandering. Walker, invisible, figuratively and metaphorical in
his family home, he became the epitome of Ellison’s greatest work. He made friends to assuage his loneliness.
Solitude became preferable, his first
true possession, not given as a gift but received by default. Intangible,
therefore beyond simple theft, able to be used alone or in the midst of a
crowd. It was his. His mother couldn’t intuit it as she did so many other
things: the time of day, when his hair needed cutting, whose footsteps were
coming up the driveway, what each neighbor’s car sounded like, his loneliness
was invisible to the blind woman. Most importantly, his father couldn’t see it,
to then ignore it, like he had Walker’s passable good grades. He couldn’t match his older brothers
scholastic and athletic accomplishments.
Invisible, Walker slipped from high school to college destined to
harmlessly melt into the rest of the outside world, drug dealing making him
evident. The end of his excelling brother
Phil who later failed at drug sales, was the final reason for his father to
overlook him.
The solitude though accepted him for
what he was. “I will always be here, Walker. I will never ignore you. As a
vast nothingness, that only you can possess, I love you.” When the time
came to seek profit, Walker surrounded by friends his forced charm had created,
turned to the solitude, now a partner akin to an ephemeral lover.How can I profit? What can I do?You hear their loneliness, emptiness. They trust you. Now fill it.
A drug dealer was born, to fill the
loneliness, the emptiness, the awkwardness, the second place-ness in others
that Walker too, acutely experienced. He found that commonality was worthy of
cash exchange. Walker abhorred violence though. He found it messy, attention
grabbing. But his profession demanded a comfort with using it, the necessity
for it. In almost fifteen years of being a single dealer with one lieutenant,
Laseem, a dozen or so Corner Boys, a few runners, a couple of spotters, and a
steady clientele that had kept him making a fairly decent dollar. He was forced to draw his gun four times,
fire it four times, been shot at and into other people only four times. None of
those targets though had died. He thought that was a good street record, similar
to a police officer’s professional file. But times, they were a changing and
chewing at the edges of his rather bloodless history was coming a test. A test
of how far he would go.
Walker had never killed anyone though
he was responsible for at least one death, his parents asserted, and he had to
agree with them. Drug dealing rarely worked out as a family enterprise; one’s
skin, noses, and foreheads were commonalities in family faces, but the heart,
the steel of character it took to run an operation, to hold a gun, to deal with
fiends and sociopathic employees, wasn’t. Walker, and his family, had learned,
that the hard way from police pictures and a closed casket on Phil. But they
were the Harding’s, weren’t they? Everything was learned the hard way
with them, was the extended family joke.
The hard way now was the gangs, one in
particular that was creeping all along the various blocks, itching to
challenge, to overrun his territory. Stomping on his bags, diluting them to
tarnish his street cred. Hiring his Corner Boys away, terrorizing the rest. He
knew logically he didn’t have much longer, a year maybe two, if he started
building his own posse of soldiers to stand tall. A year, tops, if he didn’t.
Maybe that was the itch to move, a sense of inevitability, that his near
spotless record was about to be draped in blood. He had a little money put
away, enough to last a good while if he stayed out of his profession and enough
to set him up to his current level, if he didn’t.
The distributor to him and half a dozen
of the gang factions around him was his last eroding line of
non-confrontational defense. Poppa Joe was getting old though, he was at least
seventy, and a lot of the boys to men he’d nurtured into this illicit life,
were dying off, being killed off, taking their loot and running off or worse,
throwing in with other gangs. He had offered to do a sit down with Walker’s
foe, Gat and hammer out a deal, a deal that would keep them all alive and
prosperous. Word on the street though was that there could only be one King and
Gat had been a reigning one for years now. The question wasn’t if he would
consume Walker but how much of Walker he would consume. Unless Walker decided
to ruin his almost spotless record.The dilemma of the urban Black chemical
entrepreneur, Walker grieved as he surveyed the neighborhood from the roof.
“Now who the fuck are you?” He watched
a young man, in his twenties, lean, handsome, come towards and then into the
building. That leather jacket cost at least a few grand, Walker had one like it.
His gait was strong but somehow hesitant, not sure if he was in the right place
but resigned if he were.A new fucking dealer? On his turf?
Shit, that was the last thing he needed
moving into the building. Nah, the boy was too nervous about the neighborhood,
watching his ass like a cat that’s sat in Alpo at the dog pound. (One of his
father’s colorful little homilies.) Definitely not a cop or social worker. Boy
was Black, closer to beige though. Mixed, offay nigga. Obviously used to
money at some point and he definitely didn’t grow up any place that looked like
Brooklyn. He had two duffel bags on his back, he was here to stay.
Worth watching, Walker decided flicking
the spent cigarette butt down to the street. An avid student of Dr. Paul Ekman
and having studied micro-expressions and behavioral analysis in school, Walker
could see nearly everything on a person, about a person. That skill and his own
propensity to suspicion had kept him alive in this ruthless situation for
years, even when it had claimed those closest to him.He then saw Lil’ Johnny
leaving out of the building so with a short grin he made his way across the
hall to his momma.
Like clockwork, she was waiting on the
couch. The door having been left ajar for him.
“Hey, baby.” Cassie was seated, in the corner of the living
room that was also her bedroom, legs apart, hair dangling twelve inches in
twisted braids below her throat, some almost covering her breasts. Her head
cocked up as she took a long drag on a cigarette, her eyes half closed but her
pose like that of a lonesome Queen, awaiting her ebon knight.
“I give you drugs. You give me sex.
Damn good sex,” Walker singsonged along with the jazz playing in the
background, a few hours later. He was naked, exhausted and satisfied, looking
at the ceiling but Cassie heard him across the living room that was also her
bedroom. He lay contented on the fold-out couch, Cassie sat in the corner in a
flimsy yellow nightgown smoking the last of a joint.
“I hope you think of me as more than a
simple fuck,” Cassie was busy, fingers flashing, tightening her waist length
braids. She always needed a little physical space after sex. If he gave her a
few minutes then she’d want to be touched again. He’d learned over the years it
wasn’t apprehension, it was her form of exhaustion, if she didn’t pull away she
would keep consuming more and more sexually.
“I hope you think of me as more
than a simple fuck.”
“I do, Walker. I do.” He couldn’t see
her roll her eyes. All men had that little boy in them that needed to be
assured. Assured that he was her man, the one who did it for her, the one who
provided feelings and even drugs for her. At least Walker wasn’t too clingy or
possessive, she thought. It was why they’d been exclusive for so long. He let
her be the cat on the other side of the room and for that respect she let him
pet her, stroke her, feed her.
Walker wasn’t even sure if she really
meant it or what it meant that she was what he was settling for (or maybe what
she was settling for?) He had never told her that as of a year ago she was the
only woman he slept with, that when she took to the needle for her highs (or
lows, depending on how you looked at it) that he cleaned them according to
several medical pamphlets so that she’d stay disease and infection free. He
kept a private stash of everything just for her and assumed he had her wrapped
up in fear, devotion, and a misguided sense of having outwitted him so that
she’d never cop from anyone else.Did that
mean he loved her?
A decade ago there had been a long line
of intelligent beauties in school. He had cared for a few, enjoyed nearly all
but eventually moved on, out and away from most. He didn’t even know what love
was supposed to feel like in that intimate way but he knew that Cassie was
intelligent, quick-witted and capable of much, much more than she had settled
on being. It had taken time, almost two years, of simply being around her
before she’d started to show him the woman she’d been before the drugs. The
author of three books (small press but still the first writer he’d ever known),
pictures and then the stories of her exploits as part of a neo-terrorist group,
a Black militant revolutionary group known as the Fist. Of course he hadn’t
believed her at first and then slowly from time, trying to trip her up and
failing and the few scattered pictures and articles she had, he’d, in awe,
accepted it. When he wanted to piss her off he called her ‘Angie’ (after Davis)
but under the jibe was a respect.
He glanced at her, she was a prize
wrapped within rags. If she ever put down the booze and drugs, that was one
awesome woman waiting to re-emerge. But he knew that probably would never
happen. The things she never talked about, her lack of family, where she was
originally from, her kid’s father, John, was what she was trying to keep
sedated. Woman was at war with her memory, her possibilities, and the
casualties.
“I may need you to help me with
something.” He got up from the pull out sofa bed and padded into the bathroom.
She listened to him pee and then watched silently as he came back out. “Did you
hear me?”
“Yeah, I heard you. What? What you want
me to do?” she was trying not to grin at how pretty he was. Lean and dark. Lithe,
she decided. All those dreadlocks, longer than her own head of long braids.
Such a delicate face yet still masculine with or without stubble. Manly. Intense.
Like his brother’s had been. Walker was elegant like a panther or a jaguar. A
black jaguar. He moved near silently, watched everything intently, a slight
air of menace in his low baritone. Perhaps it was the spilled blood between
them, the taboo of having crossed a body to crawl onto the other, but the sex
was always electric, even after so many years. If she wasn’t preoccupied with
forgetting a thousand other things, she would’ve given him the attention he
deserved. But she suspected if she ever did give him too much attention, he
would slip away. Her distancing kept him pursuing and ironically his pursuing,
kept her maintaining a slender distance.
“I want you to look up stuff for me at
your job tonight.”
“At the paper’s morgue? Stuff? What
stuff?”
“Black stuff. About our people in other
places. Like Africa. How it is today?”
“Why? You thinking about going?”
Yes. “No. I just want to
be as smart as you when we get to rapping.”
Cassie eyed him carefully, then nodded,
a basic whatever and busied herself rolling another joint. She had
learned long ago that men, Black men, were always searching for a mythical somewhere.
A somewhere better than the here and now. Maybe because they didn’t have
the babies they didn’t feel attached to anything, even where they were
standing. Maybe it was because staying with one woman, one house, was an
attachment, and that was terrifying? She wasn’t nervous that he would leave her
though. If she examined it too closely she might find that she didn’t care if
he stayed or left. He was the best connect she’d ever had though. Kept her
supplied and clean and just a hairs breadth under stupefied twenty four seven.
He loved her, she knew this, he probably would deny it or obfuscate around it
or prevaricate the depth but she’d seen the yearning in him years back when he
was just the brother of the man she was sleeping with. She’d kept a mental pin
on him in her head for future reference and sure enough, when two men failed
her, took from her, ripped life from her, she had this last one to parlay. So
far, he’d turned out to be a pretty good bet. But if he left, then what? Cassie
took a long drag and let that thought drift away with the smoke she blew out.
She watched him.
If her pulse hadn’t of been eased by
weed, and occasionally, heroin, she would’ve been able to feel the skip of her
heart, the startle her stomach did at the sight of him. He wasn’t ripped, with
he-man muscles, but corded, long arms and legs the color of licorice. That high
plum booty. His confusingly long and girthed penis cable vein rising down its
length. Hooded like his eyes but the slash of purple-red kings’ crown so that
you couldn’t tell if he was circumcised or not. Maybe, his manhood was too much
for even his own skin?His brother’s had been the same.All veils and shadows and
braids and draping dreds, he rarely used his hands to move the twelve, twenty,
thirty inch tentacles from his face or shoulders. He peeked, no saw, he saw you
though the throng, like a shaggy dog who should’ve been blinded but wasn’t.
In the corner, far back past the
printing presses and HVACs of the Daily News, in the bowels of the
newspaper building, in a box of cubicles long abandoned by anyone but Cassie,
she worked. Work came ten years ago into a plastic box but now came it was sent
to her into an electronic inbox of research requests. She’d put on Coltrane,
Mingus, Aretha, Nina, Prince, Janet, Macy, Curtis, Donny, even Wynton and Miles
loud enough to hear a strain over the presses two hundred feet away. She’d
close her eyes, whether Walker was in front of her like now or a borough away
as she sat at her desk, and she’d admire the image in her mind’s eyes. She
hadn’t trusted her flesh eyes in over thirty years. But she trusted the images
she held of him and her boy.
Cassie would let music help her love
those imageries so that when she looked at Walker in person, looked him in his
flesh eyes, she could be devoid of everything but self-interest, sometimes his,
most times hers.
“The only way to be safe is to meet
your enemy head on. Get him to lay down his arms in compromise. Then you
attack. Sun Tzu.” Cassie knew his anxiety was really about the upcoming summit
meeting.
Walker eyed her. “You encouraging me or
telling me?”
“I don’t fuck men who are resigned to
roll over and die, Walker. Be about your shit, take the crown if you
have a chance. Or don’t come back. And if you’re not coming back, give him my
number.”
Walker wanted to be angered by what she
said but he leaned down and moved the braids out of her face. “I could run but
where would I find a Lady Macbeth like you at?”
“No fucking where, that’s where,” she
let her smoke and breath blow at his thickening member, watching its' length
slowly, beautifully, engorge. Less than eight inches away from her lips,
swelling to cover the distance, with an inch to spare, but she ignored it,
refused to acknowledge it, and refused it her mad sex.
“Look into those places for me. Every
man needs options to imagine about as he goes to war. Keeps me inspired.”
“Imaginings. Ummhmm. I’ll bring you
stuff, baby.”
Every few months Walker investigated
where he could go. California? Chicago? Brazil? Europe? Somehow just knowing
there was more out there made it easier to stay here. The option to run was
always on the tips of his toes but he was tied here by relationships he hadn’t
meant to have. He was their bulwark against the seen and the unseen. He was
their trickster, their soldier, their protector from the world. Walker put his
dreadlocks back into a rubber band pony tail, pulled on his t-shirt and jeans
then slipped on the shoulder holster for his 9mm and another shirt to barely
cover it, the front hanging open. Over the past few months, his second in
command, Laseem had encouraged him to always be strapped, that their rivals
were coming, sooner rather than later.
Walker knew by his watch that her boy,
Lil’ Johnny, would be in from school soon. Cassie didn’t seem to care about
laying all out in the living room. But Walker did. Not from propriety but the
kid spooked him; he was clearly contributing to Cassie’s destruction, Walker
didn’t kid himself about how this would end up. Or maybe it was just that the
boy looked at him. Not at him. Not through him, glassy eye. But into
him. For a man who’d grown up not being looked at on many levels, that simple
act unnerved him past anger or a sense of intrusion, to a place of not quite
respect but a healthy feeling of not wanting to be under them eyes, or any
others, for too long.
“Got to do business. Collections.”
Walker headed out the door, half-aroused by her, their game in play. She would
leave him ready for more and he would leave ready for more. Their teasing
denial of the other.
“Get paid, baby.” Her eyes hard on him,
keeping touch with his until he was forced to turn away. She meant it, don’t
come back without a crown or give the reigning King my number if you punk
out and run.
Her eyes were those of a slightly
deranged, exiled Queen.
Walker wondered if when Cassie was
totally lucid, back in the day, those had always been her eyes.
Back In the Day
Cassie, who’d briefly been Cassandra
before going head blind to what she’d seen (and felt, regarding what she’d
seen) signed the final papers on her twenty-first birthday and left the halfway
house for a college campus. She sat attentively, her education paid for by the
color generous state and learned that knowledge was power and words, weapons.
John, Who Would Become Mu’min, sat next
to her one day in the cafeteria. She knew who he was, what he was and would
have no part of it. Her dreams included a small office with a big salary at the
Washington Times.
"You're Cassie. We have a class
together. Actually you wrote about me in the school newspaper. The article
about racism on campus. Remember?" casually taking one of her French
fries.
Six-four, two hundred and twenty
pounds, jeans tight enough to show off thick thighs. Muscles braided into
muscles under shirts, t-shirts, sweaters, anything he wore, skin black as a
cast iron skillet; his face ahead of handsome because it was expressive, it
teased you, tempted you, cajoled you, even mocked you but it was always
demanding something of the viewer especially together with a ready, full smile.
He was what all the girls (and a few of the boys) stared at when he walked
across campus, imagining everything that he was and could do, both vertically
and horizontally. They imagined him, Cassie imagined him and one day their son,
the years, this initial meeting and the Cause, distorted, would
re-imagine him, re-imagine his father.
Cassie Still Then Cassie looked at him.
"I ain't looking to join up."
"I ain't asking."
"Liar."
"You calling me a liar? Me?"
"You've been recruiting Blacks on
campus for two years."
"Well, well, Ms. Reporter. I'm
impressed."
"Don't play me, that's jive. What
do you want, John?" Cassie Then Cassie asked the son of Louisiana Big
John, whose son became this charismatic John as he would beget Lil’ Johnny
through Cassie Then Cassie.
"You." He took another French
fry as his word hung between them. Who was going to pick it up? You, you,
you, you.
He licked the ketchup off the tip.
Sucked the salt from the length. Teased the tip softer and softer then slurped
it in. She’d never seen someone eat like that. She never knew that watching
someone eat could fascinate her so, stir her imagination in so many directions
at once that she had to focus, focus, and focus to keep up with his words.
"I'm not a joiner. I’m not. A
joiner. I’m not.” Stuttering, skipping on this Cassie, old Cassie, new Cassie,
lonely Cassie, sexy Cassie, lost Cassie,submerged Cassie façade Cassie. John
This John, Now John, Then John Eventually Mu’min, he could make you skip,
stutter, fall, he could make you envy a French fry and be jealous of ketchup.
He could talk you right out your current mind, Cassie into her old mind, Not
Cassie but Cassandra.
"That's right, baby. You're a
leader. I can see that. That’s my skill, seeing into people. You’re a leader.
Like me. Except cooler. I need the Quintessential Nubian Queen at my side, but
she got to be cooler than me. A cool head; a tactician, a strategist. Me and
you could make a difference to all the people who ain’t got leaders. We need
Kings and Queens to lead them out of this hegemonic wasteland. You do want to
help your people, right? I know you do. Your writing says you see the fraud and
conspiracy that you know what’s really going on.”
Passion was like a virus seeping into
her veins but she had only one cause, one passion. Cassie’s life was words.
(Because her spirit was lost in dreams and her memory kinda sorta a little bit
blank before signing the papers in the hospital.)
"Sorry, John. I'm not
interested," Cassie was lying, because she was becoming again, truly
Cassandra. And Cassandra wasn’t just interested, she was already planning and
plotting and sure of how to support John. Enrapture him. Take him
further than his words now.
"Final piece of honey: what a
wonderful book this would make. No one has an inside eye to the hardcore
revolutionary side of the Movement. Think about it," John Who Some Called
Jack when he was at the secret meetings, the meetings that involved weapons for
not a cold intellectual, but a hot, gunfire war, and in the presence of a
hidden black mamba, was when he became Mu’min for a moment. Mu’min, the
synthesis of John, Jack and Cassandra. Already just their proximity was
burgeoning the other. In truth, John, Cassie and Jack were all in the way to
the two who were really having a conversation, a meeting of the minds, of the
spirits: Mu’min and Cassandra.
Lost and lonely, Cassie watched him
leave and could see why so many fell in line and under his spell, why so many
of the girls gave it up, why she'd found only his voice as the authority on
racism amongst students, why he was a King. All of her though gravitated, and
always would, whether Cassie or more, to Kings. Her virtue accessible only by
horizontally crossing from one throne to another.
No longer Cassie, she glanced at the
twenty or thirty of them at the other side of the room that John had joined.
Together, laughing, struggling and revolting with a strength that was a secret
and a subversive web.
I would be their Queen.I could deal a blow to those well-adjusted
to injustice.
Cassandra blew out a candle and Cassie
was gone.
![Hush by [Doyle, Brian Kyle, Phoenix, Kyle]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/414GouBX4RL._SY346_.jpg)
Synopsis
All at once.Hush, hush…They all come to Pinnacle Apartments: the oracular activist/terrorist; the displaced drag queen; the sexually and racially liberated scion; the seemingly immortal mojo luna woman; the war ravaged prostitute; the patient, loveless caretaker; the son of a lynched man; the mother-sister to her own child; the sadistic charmer; the time traveling drug dealer; the well-trained wife and mother; the child who sees them all; and the child only a few can see.Somebody’s calling my name….They come for money, escape, salvation, revenge, prey, and even hope. Hush, hush…They come covered in blood, cast from blood, natural aeaeae blood. Somebody’s calling my name….Dragging ghosts and spirits and brutality and love, they come.Oh my Lord, Into poverty and madness, lead by African gods and goddesses, dressed as neighbors who dance through the streets, they come.Oh my Lord,They come, called to this place, a place that like a hymnal christens them to respond to the query:What shall I do?All at once.
www.kyle-phoenix.com
Smile, Kyle
KylePhoenixShow@Gmail.com
The Kyle Phoenix Show LIVE STREAMING on MNN.org 1130pm, Spectrum Cable Manhattan, NY Channel 56 & 1996, also FIOS 34 and RCN 83.
Don't forget to watch The Kyle Phoenix Show LIVESTREAM on Channel 56 (Time Warner), 83 (RCN), 34 (Verizon) Thursdays 1130pm
Kyle Phoenix is a teacher, certified adult educator, sexologist, sex coach and sexuality educator with over two decades of intensive experience. He studied at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, New York University, and Columbia University. He has worked, consulted and taught individuals and focused professional developments for the CDC, Department of Education, Gay Men's Health Crisis, New York City Department of Health, non-profits, Fortune 500 companies and unions. He began his career facilitating on-campus workshops addressing a wide range of sexuality and sexual health issues and then moved on to teaching at universities, non-profits, private groups and clients, hosting The Kyle Phoenix Show on television and multiple online webinars, including YouTube and Sclipo and writing extensively through his blog, Special Reports, articles and other print and E books in the Kyle Phoenix Series on relationships, finance, education, spirituality and culture. He lives in New York with his family.
Smile, Kyle
KylePhoenixShow@Gmail.com
#KylePhoenix
#TheKylePhoenixShow
Kyle Phoenix on Facebook and TwitterThe Kyle Phoenix Show LIVE STREAMING on MNN.org 1130pm, Spectrum Cable Manhattan, NY Channel 56 & 1996, also FIOS 34 and RCN 83.
Or Click Below to:
Don't forget to watch The Kyle Phoenix Show LIVESTREAM on Channel 56 (Time Warner), 83 (RCN), 34 (Verizon) Thursdays 1130pm
Kyle Phoenix is a teacher, certified adult educator, sexologist, sex coach and sexuality educator with over two decades of intensive experience. He studied at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, New York University, and Columbia University. He has worked, consulted and taught individuals and focused professional developments for the CDC, Department of Education, Gay Men's Health Crisis, New York City Department of Health, non-profits, Fortune 500 companies and unions. He began his career facilitating on-campus workshops addressing a wide range of sexuality and sexual health issues and then moved on to teaching at universities, non-profits, private groups and clients, hosting The Kyle Phoenix Show on television and multiple online webinars, including YouTube and Sclipo and writing extensively through his blog, Special Reports, articles and other print and E books in the Kyle Phoenix Series on relationships, finance, education, spirituality and culture. He lives in New York with his family.
www.kylephoenix.com
Smile, Kyle
KylePhoenixShow@Gmail.com
KylePhoenixShow@Gmail.com
#KylePhoenix
#TheKylePhoenixShow
#TheKylePhoenixShow
Or Click Below to:
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