Strivers Row (57 page)

There was even a fairy, old enough to be his father, who he had to steer up to West 144th Street sometimes. Sammy had a friend from the Braddock who said he wasn't that way normally, but would do him for the money. The aging fairy would take off his clothes and get on a table, and Sammy's friend would massage him all over with oil, then pull on his cock until he came. Malcolm had watched it a couple times, even though he was ashamed of himself for it, making sure to hang far back behind the anteroom curtain. Nonetheless, the next time the fairy had beckoned to Sammy's friend to lean down, and whispered something in his ear. The masseur had grinned, and nodded—and then to Malcolm's horror had come walking straight toward where he was hidden behind the curtain.

“He says he wants you to join us,” Sammy's friend told him, grinning from ear to ear, his gold teeth shining in his mouth.

“He say he give you double. Just between you 'n him, Sammy don't gotta know.”

“Tell him to go fuck hisself. Tell him I'll oil up his head for the mothafuckah, that's what I'll do!” Malcolm had sworn, then dashed back out the front door, the masseur's laughter trailing after him.

“What's wrong with that? Make you some good money fo' not much work,” Sammy had teased him when he heard about it.

“You can go to hell, too.”

“Ah, now don't be like that! Seriously, I got some he-shes down the Braddock, they pay serious money just to give some soldier a suck job. It's just you sittin' back an' enjoyin' it—”

“Don't even talk that shit!”

Sometimes, in the beginning, Malcolm had needed to take a Nembutal or a Seconal to calm himself down, prepare himself for his assignments in the downtown hotels. Never spending more than five minutes even on the sidewalk outside, acutely aware as he was of the doormen, and the house detectives sizing him up. But before long he had had to switch to Benzedrine tablets just to get himself going. He would pop a couple bennies in the morning, then another in the late afternoon, and still another if it looked like it was going to be a long night. When he finally got home he would smoke a few sticks, or some opium or hashish, in order to get to sleep.

Sometimes Sammy would pay him partly in cocaine, and Malcolm would take a snort or two of that to get himself going in the mornings. Sammy tried to get him to shoot some heroin as well, but he wouldn't have anything to do with needles.

Remembering that afternoon when they had left her in Kalamazoo. A nurse bustling past them with an array of silver hypodermics on a tray, headed for his mother's room—

He found himself thinking more and more of his mother, and he was filled with a greater sense of foreboding than he had had at any time since those last weeks before she was taken away to Kalamazoo, when she only sat rocking in her chair with Butch, not talking to anyone. His sleep was different now, too, deeper, but bothered by dreams he could not remember. He often didn't know just when he had fallen asleep—waking up sometimes to find himself propped up in bed, a lit cigarette still burning in the ashtray on his lap. He didn't even think about Miranda all the time now.

He did dream still of making enough money to buy her a car, or a nightclub, and cutting her free from West Indian Archie. If he finished early enough with the johns he would root up a card game— tonk or blackjack or poker, or maybe a game of craps. Betting freely, winning or losing forty, even fifty dollars a night. Shrugging it off and acting as if it were no big thing if he lost; taking himself home carefully if he won. He would circle the block at least twice, when he left the game, switching from the trolley to the subway, or vice versa, if he thought any other face around the table looked bitter or angry, or hungry enough, when he walked out the door. And when he finally made it home, before he got into bed, he crumpled pages of newspapers or magazines all around his room, which was a trick he remembered from
The Maltese Falcon.

Then one night he came home to find that his room had been turned over while he was gone. The signs were subtle, whoever had done it hadn't meant to be caught at it, but Sammy the Pimp had taught him how to tell if his room had been searched, and he was sure that someone had been there. None of his few belongings had been taken; even his bankroll was still tucked away in his sweet-potato shoes. But he could still tell—how the bedspread was a little less tight around his pillow, the way his suits had been reordered and the piles of comic books under his bed had been reshuffled, and put back out of order.

“What you gotta look out for is what
is
there, not what isn't,” Sammy the Pimp instructed him again when he had run up to his apartment to ask him what this might mean.

“What's that mean?”

“Them vice cops, lotta times, they don' find what they need, they plant it anyhow. Then they come back an'
find
it when you there.”

Malcolm had not wanted to return to his room at all, after that—finally slipping back in only after he had watched his apartment house for hours, walking back and forth across the street. He had bundled up everything he had as quickly as he could then, stuffing it into a couple of cheap suitcases and running back down the stairs, going out again through the back, boiler-room door.

By the time he put his head on his pillow that night, he had moved into another rented room, in another building. The next day he kept moving. Staying in no one place for more than a couple days, a week at most. Taking furnished rooms and suites of rooms, depending on how much money he had. Staying in the same neighborhood around the foot of Sugar Hill that he had always liked since that first night at the rent party, though usually now in basement rooms that Sammy the Pimp told him was where all the biggest drug dealers lived.

“It's perfect if the cops come,” he explained to him. “You got bars on all your windows, an' anybody comes down to see you they gotta walk right past 'em. You can be out through the janitor's door, or up to the lobby 'fo' they even done knockin'.”

Malcolm himself would walk right past the door of his latest apartment once, twice—then bolt suddenly down the outside stairs, just as it looked as if he might walk past again. Pulling out his little .25 as he did, whipping the door open but not going inside just yet, straining to hear any sound from within the darkened rooms. He would rifle hurriedly through all his things to see if anything had been messed with, checking to see if his telltale traces—a hair wrapped around a book that only he would know about, a sheet folded in a certain way—had been disturbed. Checking it all over again sometimes, unable to remember just where and how his traces had been. Only when he was satisfied that nothing had been removed, or planted, would he be able to relax, and pull out his stash.

But sometimes, too, late at night, or after he had shared some gage or too much whiskey at the card game, he would forget where he had moved that day and go back to his previous basement room, where a careless super had not bothered to change the lock. Then he would burst in to find every single trace of himself vanished, even the walls stripped bare and splotched with a white undercoat of paint—looking around, terrified, until he slowly recalled where it was he lived now.

On top of it all, he still wasn't making any money. The rooms cost more than he had ever expected—more than he had ever even
heard
of an apartment costing before, outside of New York City. He hung on to his slave with Archie, mostly because he didn't dare give it up and risk his wrath, but also because he needed the extra cash. Squeezing in his trips to Mrs. James up at the Mott Haven yards around his work for Sammy. Making, sometimes, as many as two and even three trips a day across the great, humming grey bridge, as the war-production plants boomed, and the betting slips multiplied.

It was all he could do to get down to the Main Stem from time to time to buy himself a few sticks—Sammy having cut off his supply of kisca for the time being, until Malcolm paid up what he owed. He didn't mind so much, just as glad to see less of Sammy, whom he didn't trust for reasons that he couldn't quite put his mind on, but that he felt in his gut. He preferred strolling along with the crowds on 125th Street, anyway, looking for his connection. Picking up whatever hype was coming over The Wire, just seeing all the sights, the gaggles of glamour girls, and the smirking soldiers and sailors.

He always liked to walk by the lounge at the Braddock Hotel, on the off chance that he might see some of the stars he had sold to, although he was too embarrassed to go into the lounge and say hello. Eating a quick lunch in the window of The Clean Spot diner, hoping that some of them might walk by and see him there, though they never did.

Whenever Malcolm did get down to 125th Street, he stopped by Prof. Toussaint's African National Bookstore and House of Common Sense, too, and sometimes he ached to go in and see the Black Hall of Fame, and its grizzled little proprietor again, and ask him all about the books he had sold him. But he always balked at the last moment before going in, too ashamed of what he was doing, knowing how Prof. Toussaint would look when he told him.

Instead, he would linger outside, gazing in the dusty windows. Taking in the sidewalk speaker who had set up his stepladder and flag on the curb just outside. The last time he'd gone by, he'd noticed the speaker was different from any he had seen before— taller, without any fez or skullcap, but wearing what looked to be some sort of homemade uniform, with a row of medals on the front, including one of an orange and yellow rising sun, just like ones he had seen in the newsreels. When he looked at the man's face, he saw that he didn't look like any regular colored man, either, but like some sort of mix between a Negro and an Oriental, his skin a light brown but his eyes narrow, and Japanese.

“My friends, I am Commander Robert Leonard Jordan, and I am here to tell you that a new epoch in world history is upon us!” he began to shout once he had climbed to the top steps of his ladder. “I can tell you that I was there for the historic Japanese victories at Bataan, and Corregidor, and that this is only the beginning! Don't believe what you read in the white man's papers 'bout the war! Even as we speak, the masses of Asia are rising, and following the lead of our Japanese brothers, half a billion strong!”

He had attracted an immediate crowd, as he could hardly avoid doing, set up on a busy corner of 125th Street. Malcolm noticed that some people pushed angrily by, swearing, but that more seemed genuinely interested in stopping and listening. A few of them whistled and heckled him from the back, but more laughed, and nodded their heads fiercely.

“That's right, that's right! They gave the white man the boot down there,” he heard someone say.

“Those ofay got the surprise a their lives—”

“Believe me, brothers and sisters, when I tell you I'm gonna have President Roosevelt hisself pickin' cotton after Japan crushes this country!” the man on the stepladder went on. “Secretary Knox an' Secretary Stimson gonna be ridin' me around in
rickshaws!
Support the Onward Movement of America! No one should be afraid to join this movement! We are protected by big people—”

By now, a bunch of white servicemen had joined the crowd, jeering Robert Leonard Jordan more angrily. The colored men and women laughing at the whole spectacle at first, but then beginning to shove angrily at the white sailors and soldiers.

“Let the man speak!”

“He's a goddamned traitor—”

“Let him have his say! You don't come up Harlem, tell us who can speak an' who can't!”

The shoving turned into a fistfight, and then there was the sound of a siren from a few blocks away, and the roar of the ceaseless motorcycle patrols coming down Seventh Avenue. Malcolm watched as the white servicemen ran off, and when he looked back at the stepladder, he saw that Robert Leonard Jordan was gone, too, as quickly as if he had disappeared into thin air. But most of the rest of the crowd stood its ground, a couple of bottles even smashing at the tall black boots of the motorcycle patrolmen as they pulled over to the curb.

“All right, all right! Move it on!” one of them called out, though Malcolm noticed that he stayed where he was, straddling his bike in the street. “Nothin' to see here!”

“Nothin' for
you
here!” a woman's indignant voice called out from the crowd. “You go on your business, go pick up your money from those white gangsters. Nothin' here but people talkin'!”

“Damned straight!”

Other voices took up the refrain, the colored faces all around Malcolm seething. The cops stayed where they were, as if still debating with themselves over whether to wade into the crowd. Malcolm took a quick step or two backward himself, remembering the sticks he had just purchased, in his pocket, the gun he carried all the time now in the back of his pants.

He felt a hand on his arm, and spun around. His right hand feeling for the gun in the small of his back, even as he realized what a foolish move that would be if it was a cop's hand he had felt. But just then he recognized the grizzled little man from the bookstore, Prof. Toussaint, grinning at him under his gray-specked moustache— wearing a small round cap that was just like the one he had seen on Elijah, only without any of the planets, or other insignia.

“Hello, young man! How's that education comin' along?”

“All right,” Malcolm said uncertainly, wanting to tell and ask him so much more, but unsure of just what he could actually say, afraid that he might sound too foolish.

“Man can learn a lot for himself, just sitting in his room an' reading,” Prof. Toussaint said meaningfully. “Not so much he can learn watchin' a pack of fools on a street corner.”

“I know it,” Malcolm said, starting to turn away. Knowing that he had to get up to the George Washington, but afraid to tell Prof. Toussaint what he was doing.