Haiku (7 page)

“So, the more hotly a gang would pursue its … rep, the more likely it would be assigned a worker?” I asked. “And if having a worker enhanced the gang’s rep …”

“Full-circle,” Lamont said, smiling.

“But if every little block—?”

“I said claim
and
hold, bro. That’s how the huge clubs got all their power. The Chaplains, the Bishops, the Enchanters—what they did was take over a lot of the small clubs. And they did it slick, too. You tell the President of some ten-man club that now he’s a flunky, he’s
got
to go to war behind that. But if you show him some respect, ask him to ‘affiliate,’ his rep goes
up
, not down. So his little club, now it’s a chapter in a
big
one, you with me?”

“It is a clever tactic.”

“Double-slick,” Lamont said. “Because the big clubs, they won’t even
ask
unless you first show you got the stuff.”

“By fighting?”

“That was it. Nothing else would do it. And it had to be face-to-face, like I said. But once you got with one of the big clubs, then it was open season. We still had meets, only now you had clubs Japping each other in their own territories.”

If Lamont expected me to react to his association of sneak attacks with Japan, he was disappointed. But I somehow felt he was simply speaking without self-editing.

“We had drive-bys even back then, is what I’m saying. Only that was
raiding
, not just blasting away. It takes real
cojones
to light up another gang’s clubhouse. But if your club
just rolled into enemy turf blasting out the windows at anything that moved, that’d bring your rep
down
.“

“Ah.”

“You’re supposed to get medals for killing the enemy, not for civilians. Why you think Ranger’s so fucked in the head, Ho? We flew our colors like a flag, right out there where the enemy could see them. But Ranger, he didn’t even know who the enemy
was
. Like he told us, they killed
plenty
of folks over there. Whole fucking villages. Just hosed ’em down, like those drive-by punks do now.

“I lost a pal behind that shit a few years ago. Everybody called him ‘Pogo,’ on account of he couldn’t sit still. But he was a good pal; if he scored a dime, you had a nickel. Broad daylight, some motherfuckers just opened up on a little park downtown. Four people killed. Made all the papers—a little girl was shot in the head.

“I heard on the drums that Pogo was in the morgue. In the papers, they just said ‘unidentified homeless man,’ and some description that could fit half the niggers in this city. But I knew it was Pogo. Man never missed Wednesday suppers at this church in the Village. When he didn’t show for two in a row, that was the same as Pogo’s obituary. Only one he was ever going to get.”

I had learned Lamont’s story in pieces, as one slowly unwraps a precious gift. He had gone to prison as a young man for stabbing a rival gang leader in what another culture might
have called a duel. Because his foe had died, Lamont’s sentence had been a lengthy one.

While imprisoned, Lamont had taught himself to read. “You either kill the time or the time kills you,” he told me, as if he needed to excuse what I viewed as a most admirable achievement.

Reading transported Lamont to places he had never known existed when he was “free.” Through correspondence study, he became a college graduate, and looked forward to the day when he might become a teacher upon his release.

Such might have happened but for Lamont’s poetry. Although truly gifted, he pursued his art for its own sake, quite content with the meager circulation his work received inside the closed circle of those with whom he corresponded.

This balance was disrupted when Lamont’s poetry was somehow discovered by a wealthy woman with many literary connections. Her power was considerable, and Lamont’s first volume of poetry,
B & E
, was published to great acclaim while he was still incarcerated.

“I thought I was going to be the next great thing, Ho,” he told me. “I couldn’t get over myself.”

Arrogance as spirit-killer. This I understood.

“The minute I got the gate, I never looked back,” Lamont continued. “I never looked at anything but my own picture on that book jacket. And I loved those literary parties—salons, they called them, Ho.

“But then I snapped that I wasn’t a star; I was an exhibit in a traveling zoo. A petting zoo. ‘Literary circle,’ my ass. I was never one of them—I was just the fucking entertainment.
They held me that high up just for the fun of stepping away and watching me crash.

“I’d faced death, Ho. And I had never blinked, not on the street, not in the joint. Death? I walked it down. Here’s what I knew: if it took me, it’d be taking a
man
. When they poured that ‘X’ of red wine on the sidewalk and called my name, I’d hear it, wherever I was: ‘Lamont, that boy, he had
heart.’

“But those bloodsuckers did something to me I thought nobody could ever do. They
took
my heart, Ho.”

That was the only time I ever saw Lamont surrender to his emotions. I stood guard as he sobbed. I was greatly honored to be entrusted with such a sacred task. I felt new power surge within me as I stood with my back to Lamont. None would see my friend in his moment of shame—I would die first. And it would be an honorable death.

Lamont has one copy of his book left. He carries it with him everywhere. The first time he allowed me to read it, I was plunged headlong down a mineshaft of empathetic loss. Lamont had written his own haiku. And it had been stolen from him.

“Got any ideas?” he asked me that morning.

“I do not,” I confessed.

“I’ve been puzzling over it myself, Ho. There can’t be
that many cars like the one we’re looking for. But we don’t exactly have access to the DMV computers, either.”

“No,” I agreed. “And a vehicle such as the one we seek would be garaged when not in use.”

“So …?”

“Would not such a car be driven by a chauffeur, rather than an individual?”

“Yeah …” Lamont said slowly, allowing his voice to trail off. “Unless …”

I waited as he took a generous sip from his cup. I noted that his eyes were clear and focused. Then I quickly reminded myself that I had often mistaken that look for sobriety.

“I keep thinking about the color, Ho.”

“White? Does that have some special significance?”

“Maybe. It’s kind of, I don’t know … tacky, like. I mean, you’re some kind of millionaire, maybe you want a Rolls to drive around in.
Be
driven around in, like you said. But white is just …
déclassé
for a car like that. White’s for something you rent, not something you own.”

“You think it might belong to a limousine company?”

“I
did
think that, for about a hot minute, but then something else came to me. Remember when Michael was describing the car?”

“Yes.”

“He never said it was
big
,” Lamont said.

“Would that not be implied, considering the—”

“Sure, there’s no such thing as a Rolls-Royce
compact
, that’s right. But, Ho, if it was a stretch, that’s something
Michael would have picked up on—that’s from his world. His old world, I mean. The way I figure it, you’re a limo company, you’re going to invest in a damn
Rolls
, you go for the biggest one you can buy, get the most use out of it, see?”

“So we return to the idea of it being personally owned?”

“Right. Personally owned, personally driven. Who wants to make that kind of statement, Ho?”

I shrugged, indicating my lack of knowledge on the subject.

“A pimp,” Lamont said, flatly. “If you’re a pro athlete, or a rock star, or whatever, you get one of your posse to drive. But whoever heard of a pimp letting anyone besides himself behind the wheel of his ride?”

“I know nothing about such things,” I acknowledged.

“The woman Michael saw, she was
a young
woman—”

“Michael did not say so,” I protested.

“It’s what he
didn’t
say, Ho. If she had been an old lady—you know, the kind that’s used to riding in the back seat—it would have been strange to see her climb out of the driver’s seat. But Michael didn’t say anything about that. And a
white
mink? That’s a young broad’s coat, not a dowager’s.”

“So you believe the young woman herself was a …?”

“Hooker? That’s right. And how is a hooker
ever
gonna be driving her pimp’s car?”

“I do not understand how such things are done,” I said. “If there is some sort of protocol—”

“We gotta get a newspaper, Ho,” Lamont interrupted my unnecessarily defensive speech. “Not this morning, it’s too soon. But maybe there’ll be something about it later on.”

“About …?”

“A dead pimp,” Lamont said, nodding to himself, as if confirming a complex proposition.

We strolled past a small vacant lot.
Temporarily
vacant, of course. Every square inch of ground is valuable here. New construction is as much a part of the fabric of this city as greed itself. It is immune to economic cycles, because it takes so many years to obtain the necessary permits that creating new luxury housing in the midst of economic disaster is commonplace.

A group of men and women were practicing t’ai chi, led by an elderly Chinese man dressed in a red jogging suit. His forms were quite good, but his transitions lacked the flow one would expect from a master of the art.

“You did stuff like that, right?” Lamont asked me.

“Something like it,” I said. “Not the same.”

We cut through an alley. As we reached the end, a large man with a shaved head spotted us. “Fucking nigger!” he shouted at Lamont.

We continued to walk toward the large man. “Fucking nigger!” he screamed again.

“You seeing things, man,” Lamont said, grinning coldly. “I’m an albino.”

The large man continued to scream his one phrase, but made no attempt to impede our progress.

In our world, such occurrences are commonplace.

“Perhaps the news might be on the radio?” I wondered out loud.

“Good call, Ho. Let’s look for one.”

Our search was not successful. Those establishments which had radios playing did not welcome those with no money to spend. We fished for a couple of hours to accumulate sufficient funds to enter a bodega and purchase a loaf of bread and a large bottle of apple juice. But even when we became paying customers, despite our most polite request, the proprietor refused to change the station on his radio.

The liquor store was also not accommodating. The man behind the thick curtain of bulletproof plastic recognized Lamont as a regular customer, but his only response was to repeat, “Buy something or get out,” in a robotic, non-human tone.

We did not even consider trying one of the many coffeehouses that are sprinkled throughout the neighborhood. We knew from experience that those who inhabit such places might fervently advocate for “The Homeless” when conversing among themselves, but would not continue to patronize any place that allowed us to loiter. Owners would advertise this policy in a variety of ways, the most common being a sign warning that use of the bathrooms was reserved for customers.

By early afternoon, the landscape was overpowered by the sun, bleaching rather than beautifying. Lamont and I turned our steps toward a tiny decrepit cement park that might once have been used by children.

“That’s
what we want,” Lamont said, pointing out a group of teenagers lounging at the base of a decapitated statue. The object of his attention was a large radio, the kind with speakers attached to its sides by wires.

As we moved closer, the noise from the speakers became as violently intrusive as a jackhammer, albeit less musical.

The young people showed no wariness at our approach. This was not due to any soporific drugs they may have consumed, or a deliberate pose adopted to demonstrate indifference. As Lamont never tired of repeating, those not from our world simply do not
see
us.

“Hey, brother,” Lamont greeted a young black man with beaded dreadlocks who stood on the fringe of the group. “Me and my partner wonder, could we ask you to dial your box for a few minutes? There’s something we need to listen to on the radio, bro.”

“What’s that, man?” the youth replied. “The stock quotes?”

His wit was rewarded with a palm slap from a white teenager dressed in a grossly oversized shirt with the number 23 on it, hanging down over extremely baggy pants that did not fully cover his ankles.

“I ain’t asking to
hold
the box, bro. Just to listen for five, ten minutes,” Lamont wheedled, almost servilely. “Means nothing to you; could mean a lot to us.”

“Thing is,
you
don’t mean nothing to me,” the black youth said, glancing around to be certain the others understood how well he was playing the role he had chosen for himself.

Whether the others fully comprehended this, I could not
know. But I remembered Lamont’s lesson: when seeking something from another, always allow him to preserve his image. So I approached the dreadlocked youth as if he were a man of power and importance. In his world, “getting paid” would be a hallmark of such a position.

“Perhaps we might
rent
the use of your radio?” I offered, humbly.

“Yeah? For what, a bag of aluminum cans?” the black youth said, drawing the obligatory laughter from the group that had assembled around us.

“Certainly not,” I said, as if I had better manners than to expect a man of his stature to accept trivial offerings. “Would, say, ten dollars suffice?” I asked.

“You
got
ten dollars, old man?”

“We do not,” I told him honestly. “But we will pledge that amount to you, and return with it as soon as we have earned it.”

His group reacted as if I had been seeking their contempt, two of them nearly convulsing with laughter.

I felt no anger, only sadness that the concept of a man keeping his word was so alien to them that it would inspire hilarity. I stepped back, having nothing more to offer. But Lamont was not so easily deterred.