An American Dream (24 page)

“Shago, what are you on?” Cherry asked.

“Yeah.”

“Oh, no.”

“Well, that’s how it is, sugar. Come and cry with me.”

“You’re not. You can’t be on again.”

“Now, honey, couldn’t you tell? When I came in the door with the street corner bit. Up in Central Park!
Sambol
I mean I don’t go for that sauce, sugar. You know that. I’m too pretty to rumble, and that’s a fact. Rojack,” he said in my direction, “I love you, you’re so gruesome. Put some gravy on the bread.” And he began to cackle. “Why, bless bless, my Cherry, if I got to lose, I got to lose to a square with heart, I mean he’s all that heart and no potatoes, just Ivy League ass. Harvard, I presume, Doctor Rojack.”

“You’re not on horse,” Cherry said.

“Stone out of my mind, baby.”

“But you’re not on horse.”

“About to take the needle. My steps were leading me there.” He tapped his feet in a tricky little riff. “So I came to see you. You can help me stop.”

She shook her head. She was mute.

“Honey,” he said, “you’re still creaming for me.”

“I’m not. Go away, Shago, go away.” She kept her face averted from both of us.

“It’s never over,” said Shago. “I said to you once: honey, we see each other ten years from now, we still make it. You hear?”
he said to me, “it’s never over with her and me. You got nothing but the whiskey and the embers. All those piss-wet embers.”

“You won’t know,” I said. But there could be truth in what he said, I thought suddenly.

“Man,” he said, “let’s get cool and enjoy each other. I can live without my Cherry. I’ve had movie stars. I put them in my scrapbook. That’s cool. Let’s keep it that way. You ask her how many times I throw away my cool.”

“What are you on?” she repeated.

“Shit and shinola. Listen, baby, take a vacation from all this. I’m cool, now, I’m back in my cool.”

“You just waved a knife.”

“No, I’m back with the living. I swear. Here to entertain. I mean I read the scene. You and me, husband and wife except for the ring—but we
know
each other, we didn’t make it. I could cry. But still I got to wish you the best. The best, Rojack, the best, Cherry.”

“Make him leave,” Cherry spoke out, “please make him leave.”

“No, no, no,” said Shago.

The blade was out again. He held it point up, his head looking down on it like a priest with a candle. “Throw away the restraints,” he said, “throw them away.” She got up from the chair where she had been sitting since he entered the room and holding her wheat-colored wrapper about herself with both arms, she walked up to him. “Put that stick away,” she said.

“No. Tell him about the Freedom Rider bit.” But as if her presence close to him, her proximity to that knife, was vertigo for him, he closed the blade, put it back in his pocket and stepped away from both of us. Some spasm of language began in him.

“Contemplate this,” he said to me, “I did the Freedom Rider bit. Like I was running for President of the black-ass U.S.A. That’s the Dick Gregory bit, not mine, but I did it. I did it. And I mean I got nothing but elegance to sell, plus a big beat. And that big
beat comes from up High, it don’t come from me, I’m a lily-white devil in a black ass. I’m just the future, in love with myself, that’s the future. I got twenty faces, I talk the tongues, I’m a devil, what’s the devil doing on a Freedom Ride? Listen,” he said, building up force as he went, “I’m cut off from my own lines, I try to speak from my heart and it gets
snatched
. That’s Freedom Ride. Why,” he said, with no sense of going off in another direction, “you seen my act, I remember you, you brought your wife back to me, that battleship with the pearls around her neck, you think I forget, I got elegance, man, and elegance is nothing but memory. I mean I got elegance when I do my act.”

“Yes,” I said.

“And I spit in your wife’s face.”

“Metaphorically.”

“Metaphorically. Yes, I did. And I said to myself, ‘Man, you’re spitting in the face of the Devil.’ ”

“I didn’t know you thought twice about it.”

“Kiss me, sweets. Didn’t know I thought twice about it. Why I knew your wife was society bitch. That’s a
bitch!
I knew what she was promising, all that White House jazz, mow my grass, blackball, you’re so sexy—think I like to pass that up? But there was your wife asking me to sing at her charity ball for no, for her smile. I said to myself, Why, lady, you wouldn’t give half a buck to the poor nigger woman who wipes your mess in the ladies’ latrine. A quarter, that’s what she’d leave, right?”

“I don’t know.”

“Fire when ready, Gridley, we have seen the whites of their eyes.”

I began to laugh. Despite myself. Finally Shago laughed. “Yeah, man, it’s
so
funny. But I was at the big divide. Pick it up. They were ready to pick me up, make me a society singer, I’d had it with that Village shit, I’d had it with that Mob shit, that big-time shit, ‘What a nice suit you’re wearing tonight, Mr. Ganucci’—no, I
wanted the society shit cause I was right for that, but I took one look at your wife and I gave it up. I’d played it cool all the way, passed up their parties, ‘No,’ I’d have my flunky say, ‘Mr. Martin does not attend parties,’ I was a virgin, and had them eating in the crack, I was old Buddha’s ass on the stairs, but it was too much, that wife of yours—she
cooed
to me, ‘Mr. Martin, you know I can make you change your mind,’ yeah, you bet she could, till I got a good look at her sitting with you in the front, eating me, man, I could feel the marrow oozing from my bones, a
cannibal
. So, I told her what to do. Pus and dandruff to you, Peter the Great—Shago Martin ain’t adding his tit to your milk and charity.” He shook his head. “That was the end of society shit,
yeah
, but I was right for them, I was the cup of tea they’d been brewing. They knew it. Cause I can do the tongues, all that cosmopolitan
dreck
, bit of French, bit of Texas,
soupçon
of Oxford jazz—I promise you,” he interpolated with a perfect London voice, “that we’ll have masses of fun and be happy as a clam, why,” he said, snapping his fingers, “I can pick up on the German, Chinese, Russian (
Tovarich
, mother-fucker) I can do a piece of each little bit, St. Nicholas Avenue
upper
nigger, Jamaican, Japanese, Javanese, high yaller sass—I just call on my adenoids, my fat lips and tonsils,
waaaaah
, I can do a
grande dame
, anything from a gasbag to Tallulah Bankhead, ‘
Out
, you pederast,’ it’s all shit, man, except for the way I use it cause I let each accent pick its note, every tongue on a private note, when I sing it’s a congregation of tongues, that’s the spook in my music, that’s why they got to buy me big or not at all, I’m not intimate, I’m Elizabethan, a chorus, dig?”

“You’re just an old dynamo out on the moon,” said Cherry. Tenderness for him was back in her voice. Acid entered me.

“When I start talking, I hear motors. I’m a devil, see. I used to watch your television. You’re a white ass. Her and me used to sit on that sofa and watch your television. ‘What a sweet white ass’ I would say to her. We would laugh.”

“Now
you’re
on a television show,” I said.

“Yeah. Right in the hour where you used to be. Channel Forty-one. They’re so poor they don’t pay the camera. Have some hash.” He took out a cigarette rolled tight as a toothpick, lit it, offered to pass it to me. I refused. There was an unfamiliar pressure at the back of my neck, an accumulation of I did not know what, but it was from the last half hour, and it warned me to say no. I took a swallow from my whiskey glass.”

“For you, girl.” He held it to her.

“Uh-uh.” She shook her head. “Uh-uh.”

“You pregs again?” he asked. And at the expression on her face, he whistled, laughed, made a small demonstration. “Shee-it,” he cried out, “you can’t tell, you can’t tell that fast. That’s a mistake made by many. You don’t know, girl.” But the shaft was in. I saw something in his eyes as the marijuana took hold, he had not been ready for this. He had the expression of a big fish just speared—the flank of the eyeball showed horror; something in the past had just been maimed forever. He was suffering not from the possibility that she was pregnant but that she had had an experience with me which made her believe she was, and he knew all about that.

“Listen, baby, you don’t leave me,” he said. “I’ll cut out your heart. You got nothing but spade in you, and I’m left with that Southern shit. I’m a captive of white shit now,” he said looking at me, his eyes blank as a prison wall. “I bathe in the flesh, you ass,” he said again, “I keep it for myself, all that white stinkeroo, all of it, but she ain’t white, no she ain’t, not my girl, she got my black in her. Yessirree, boss, thanks for that thin dime. Listen, man, I made her knock the kid cause it was nigger, you see, black as me, and I’m a white man now.”

“You black-ass ego,” she said, “you’re not white, you’re just losing your black. That’s why you still got your spade in you and I got my white in me. Because I don’t look back. When something’s
done, it’s done. It’s
over
.” Some whiff of marijuana must have entered her nose for she talked with a strong male voice, some small-town Southern mill boss or politician—her brother, I realized then. “Do you think?” she cried out, “we built white shit and progress by saying ‘Forgive you one more time.’ Well, we didn’t, you ass, we didn’t. It’s done, Shago. Out of here.”

“Man,” he said to her, “take your devils and banish them down to us. We’re the mirror of your ass.”

“Come on, baby,” said Cherry, “don’t lose all your cool.” Her face flushed, her eyes bright, she looked eighteen, tough dittybop beautiful, eighteen. They stood glaring at one another.

“Cool! Baby, I got cool this professor of yours and you couldn’t locate in twenty years. Listen, you,” he said to me, “I should have brought my army down here. We could have put toothpicks under your nails. I’m a
prince
in my territory,
dig?
But I came alone. Cause I know this bitch, I know this Mafia bitch, she’s made it with hoodlums, black men, some of the class, now she picks you, Professor, looking to square out, she’s looking for something luke and tepid to keep her toes warm. You kissing them yet, you jackass?” And with that he walked over to me, put his fingers on my chest, gave a disdainful push, “Up your ass, Mother Fuck,” and turned around, leaving the scent of marijuana on my clothes. The pressure back of my neck let go of itself and I was a brain full of blood, the light went red, it was red. I took him from behind, my arms around his waist, hefted him in the air, and slammed him to the floor so hard his legs went, and we ended with Shago in a sitting position, and me behind him on my knees, my arms choking the air from his chest as I lifted him up and smashed him down, and lifted him up and smashed him down again. “Let me go, I’ll kill you, bugger,” he cried out, and there was a moment when I could have done that, I had the choice to let him go, let him stand up, we would fight, but I had a fear of what I heard in his voice—it was like that wail from the end of the earth you hear in a baby’s voice.
My rage took over. I lifted him up and stomped him down I don’t know how many times, ten times, fifteen, it could have been twenty, I was out of control, violence seemed to shake itself free from him each time I smashed him back to the floor and shake itself into me, I kept beating the base of his spine on the floor, the shock going up to his head, I had never had an idea I was this strong, exhilaration in the fact of the strength fed my strength itself, and then he went limp and I let go, stepped back, he fell back, the back of his head struck the floor with the blunt dud of an apple dropping from a tree.

Shago looked at me from the ground and said, “Up your ass.”

I almost kicked in his head. Close as that. Instead I picked him up, opened the door, manhandled him to the hall. There he put up resistance, and when I got a whiff of his odor which had something of defeat in it, and a smell of full nearness as if we’d been in bed for an hour—well, it was too close: I threw him down the stairs. Some hard-lodged boulder of fear I had always felt with Negroes was in the bumping, elbow-busting and crash of sound as he went barreling down, my terror going with him in the long deliberate equivalent of the event which takes place in an automobile just before a collision—and into the smash itself. The banister quivered as he hit, he looked up at me from the bottom, his face bleeding from cuts, welts springing out, his head near to misshapen like the Negro I saw in the precinct, and said, “You shit-ass,” and started trying to climb the stairs on his hands and knees which released still another core of rage in me as if it were doubly intolerable that his will would not break—I knew this was how children came to kill little cats—and I met him on the fourth stair from the bottom and ran into one weak punch he threw which caught me a glint of pain on the chin (and was bleeding later from the mark of his ring) and then rushed him across the landing and down another flight of stairs, back another landing, down another flight of stairs, the eyes of the Puerto Ricans on us from the crack of every door, me holding him with two grips on his gray conservative
suit as if he were a bag of potatoes I could bump along, and when on the last flight of stairs he tried to bite me, I threw him down the run again, and waited while he lay still.

“You had it?” I called down, like some whiskey-flushed Episcopalian minister of doom.

“Shit on your mother,” he said, getting to his hands and knees.

“Shago, I’m going to kill you,” I said.

“No, man. You kill women,” he said. It was a speech, but he said it so slowly that my breath flowed back and forth five, six, eight, ten times. “Why, shit,” said Shago, “you just killed the little woman in me.” Then he made an attempt to climb the stairs, but his leg buckled, he sat down on the floor, he vomited from the pain. I stood where I was, waiting for him to finish. “All right,” he said at last, “I’m going.”

“Shago, can I get you a cab?”

He laughed like a fiend. “Well, buddy, I fear that’s your problem.”