The Collected Novels of Charles Wright

by Charles Wright

  “And I’m off,” Mary, who is twenty-nine, lamented. “Lying bitch. She’s mad because I won’t ball with them anymore.”

  A few days later, Mary saw her social worker. Life is getting brighter. “Even if I have to go over there and throw a fit. Look, I haven’t worked in four years. I could if I wanted to. But I think I need glasses, and I have to get my teeth fixed. And you know I have to take pills. I’m a nervous wreck.” Speaking of a semi-drag queen who is almost at the top of the welfare-dollar ladder, Mary said, “That bitch. She gets $99.50 twice a month. And she’s living in the street. I saw her trying to hustle over on the Apeside.”

  The Apeside is the East Village beyond Tompkins Square Park. In TSP I met Jojo. He was very uptight, his paranoia gave off sparks. “Man. They sent my check back. Got a cigarette?” Jojo, ex-garage mechanic. Blond, extremely bright, but frightened of touching his brain. He’s spent three years in jail (robbery), dabbled in dope, and is now deep into a wine scene. He breathes like a man in deep pain. We stop off for a pint of Orange Rock. “Gotta steady my nerves, old sport.” He smiles. We kill the pint, walk across town to the welfare haven on West Thirteenth Street, where the atmosphere is heady, hopeful like a theater where chorus gypsies are auditioning. I was surprised at the well-dressed welfare recipients. Radios, cassettes, everything was of the moment. A great many of them knew each other. Talked naturally of checks and who was off or trying to get back on. There were very few old people. Mucho preschool and school-age children, chasing each other between plastic, armless chairs. Like busy mothers everywhere, these paid very little attention to the children. They had plenty of time to gossip. Time to make love. And the well-lit, clean welfare haven was a pleasant place to kill time, wait for money, though a tense line shot through the undercurrent like a peak hour at the stock exchange. There might be some fucking hang-up, a cold cross-examination. Jojo sensed this. But we kept up a fast joking conversation, sliced with a few silences.

  Almost three hours later, Jojo received a check for exactly $33. He would get more. He was properly modest. A serious Jojo faced the social worker. Welfare would arrange for a kitchenette pad. Jojo knew the ropes. After cashing the check, Jojo paid off a $7 loan, then invited me for beers, hard-boiled eggs. Later we switched to wine and watched the sports shoot pool. Life can be good for survivors.

  Nellie will ball. Please accept my word: Helena will ball. “All I want to do is stay stoned every night,” she once told me in lieu of an apology. There are few stoneless nights. Welfare money, booze, and beer from a platoon of male friends, sitting around the kitchen table, waiting on the free lay. Nellie has seven illegitimate children. Often they are hungry, thanks to their mother’s careless life-style. Life in their mother’s apartment has made them ferocious little warriors. Proud, the seven children are always on the defensive. It is only when they begin to trust you that they open up, play childish tricks, laugh. It is only then that, underneath it all, you feel as if melancholia is smothering them. I gave them candy, nickels, and dimes. I am tough, loving with them, and hope they understand.

  But sometimes they avert their eyes. Melancholia becomes a dagger. They are disappointed: I will not marry their mother and become their father. It is only because of the children that I have never bedded the mother. Although my childhood was quietly religious and happy, I, too, was briefly a child of welfare. After my grandfather died, and before my father’s World War II allotment, there was nothing my grandmother could do but apply for public assistance for me. It was a pittance in every sense of the word. Sometimes she did daywork for white families (in the village of New Franklin, Missouri, not too many white families could afford part-time help, much less full-time servants).

  I remember that in winter we became the local F.B.I. of the railroad tracks, looking for coal that had fallen from the open-bellied freight cars. Even today I can taste the delight of a Sunday supper: day-old bread in a bowl of milk sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar. I remember the Christmas we were too poor to buy a tree. But luck was with us, one cold, sunny afternoon a few days before Christmas. We found clumps of pine branches along the railroad tracks. My imaginative grandmother decided that we would make a tree. We found a small leafless young tree and tied the branches to it. It was a beautiful Christmas tree, the delight of the neighbors. And we did not even have multicolored lights for the tree. I frame this memory briefly to let you know that I understand the plight of welfare. I hold no bitterness against those days. It was a happening of that particular time.

  Yet there is dark music in the towns, cities, about the welfare recipients. We have to pay taxes to take care of these lazy, good-for-nothing bums. Still, there are the happy Lawrence Welk voices who sing, and this works to our advantage in the end. This is where we want to keep them. We will give them enough so they’ll be content and will cause us no trouble. Welfare is their addiction.

  Anyway, for those of you who are interested in trying yet another new life-style, here are a few surefire suggestions I have compiled with the help of Green Eyes, who never had to use them:

  Become an addict.

  Become an alcoholic or fake it.

  Get busted, a minor bust, though you could have a fairly cool winter in the Tombs.

  Get hepatitis.

  Have a real or fake nervous breakdown. Take the cure at Kings County or Central Islip.

  It is extremely possible for females to get liberated from work and money worries by getting pregnant.

  Warning: Above all, remember to stay on good working terms with doctors. Get a written statement from them.

  Now you’re on your own, ducks.

  THE AFTERNOONS OFFER more than a sharecropper’s bag of humidity and rain. But the lunar boys are exceptionally cool, as if the age of Aquarius had instilled in them a terrifying knowledge of silence. In groups of twos, threes, and fours, wearing brilliant-colored nylon T-shirts, jeans, John’s Bargain Store khaki walking shorts, tennis shoes, and athletic socks with deep cuffs, they are not longhaired. Immaculate, one of them wants to become a trumpet player. Another, at the age of fourteen, has had faggot grooming. Five of them are school dropouts. The boy with the “hot” $35 knitted shirts is one of six illegitimate children, all of them under the age of sixteen and on welfare.

  These budding lunar professionals will, say between two and three of an afternoon, stroll into the Old Dover Tavern (the very “in” Bowery bar). In the beginning, at the end of the school term, they stood outside, while the leader entered. Later, as confidence ripened, they entered and huddled near the door, near the cigarette and candy machines. Now they prowl up and down the bar like altar boys, seeking some rare chalice.

  The leader of one gang will ask the bartender for change or order his usual grilled-cheese sandwich. They never buy cigarettes, and it was only last Saturday night that we discovered that they have been trying to jam the candy machine.

  Then silent, their young eyes revolving, they walk out into the wet, narrow plain of the Bowery (affluent infant of artist studios, rock-and-roll craters, German police dogs, Doberman pinschers).

  Sometimes, the budding professionals will stop and rap with the wine-drinking afternoon bums. But these are really rehearsals, you might say. Scouting trips for boys with faces like stockbroking thieves. Boys who wait quietly for the oncoming darkness.

  It’s dark now, and they’ve made it over from the side streets. From the tenements and the public-housing projects in their clean clothes, as if it were the first day of school. I remember that the famed gang of late May and early June marched like stoned killers past the gloomy bank at Spring and the Bowery (the bank that is now a famous artist complex). This gang has been replaced by a gang that shoots in from West Houston.

  And these clean-cut boys, ladies and gentlemen, jackroll the wine-drinking citizens of the Bowery. The take is small or nothing. Still, there are legends of the fabulous scores, the fine old gold pocket watch, false teeth, a social-security card, and sweet, dirty old dollar bills. But these boys hav
e watched their older brothers jackroll, have watched the real pros jackroll, and have the act down solid, and it’s all so cool, so clean. A cold, passive sport.

  As one winehead told me: “They said, ‘Pops. Got any juice?’ I said, ‘Howdy boys.’ I was just setting there, on the ground. Too drunk to stand up and take a piss, and they came at me without another word. Just went through my pockets and took all that was left of the $341 got for selling blood, plus the bonus.”

  Violent vistas are part of their heritage. But they are seldom violent with the wineheads. It’s all so painless, easy. You do not even sweat. Occasionally, a winehead will get kicked in the teeth if he tries to fight back or calls the gang a bad ethnic name. Occasionally, a knife rips a coat pocket and there’s a little blood. Occasionally, an old man is doused with gasoline and set on fire. But this is another breed of urban and suburban teenager. Affluent teenagers or stoned kooks.

  No, these lunar lads are nonviolent in our luxurious age of violence. But they do not make the Bowery scene on the fifteenth and first of the month. This is big time and usually a black time. Real professional jackrollers. Black migrant workers, mainlined with the cheating stop-and-go sign of urban American and Catskill life. Damaged brains pickled in wine or cool small-time Harlem thieves down for the bi-monthly take.

  On August I, at seven in the evening, five blacks ganged up on one old white man at the corner of Prince and the Bowery.

  Traffic jammed to a halt. The Bowery bar philosophers watched the happening. The white majority (Irish and Polish) were incensed by the bold black act. But they made no effort to do anything about it, except to spray two black regulars, two queens, with a water pistol of words. “Have I ever tried to rob you?” a hard-drinking black queen asked. “Shit. I could buy and sell all of you. Don’t talk about my people.”

  Sitting four stools away, I suddenly laughed at the perverse reality of this sporting Bowery game.

  The jackrolling blacks took from the old whites in the light of the day. At night the young whites drank freely of the old black queens and often stole from them, providing the queen bedded them.

  Governor Rockefeller, campaigning for reelection, said yesterday that the addiction problem in the state had grown much bigger than he had expected four years ago.

  The New York Times, August 4

  “Young people today are being subjected to the most profound temptations and stresses—”

  Robert Sargent Shriver,

  The New York Times, August 6

  “We didn’t actually break in. The door was open so we just made ourselves at home.”

  “Hell. Charlie don’t give a shit.”

  Sitting in the living room of a building marked for demolition, I wondered if I did care. After all, squatting out has become most fashionable. Earlier, I had been sitting in a bar, when an acquaintance had invited me to a party. In the past, I had offered Duk Up Soon a place to flop for the night, an occasional quarter, advice. This invitation was a thank-you gesture. And now we were in this living room, sitting on milk crates, a car seat, and the floor. Street lamps spotlighted the room. Votive candles created a ritualistic mood. The buffet: wine, pot, beer, and pills, plus the works. The kids were very polite, and I decided to sit in and see what would happen. Then Pepe came in. We were a little surprised to see each other; our smiles bordered on warmth. I had written about Pepe before, the summer jackrolling debut. Then Pepe’s thing was pot, wine, beer, and glue. He was fourteen at the time. Now, almost seventeen, with a delicate dark mustache, sporting as always Italian knit shirts. Sneakers have replaced the $30 shoes. Sneakers are better for stealing, running. His welfare mother is now a redhead and still keeping the weekend lover. The other five children are in school and doing well. Pepe looks like a sharp vocational student as he takes the bags from the deep cuffs of his socks. Beaver has the works which until an hour ago were in a Frigidaire on Avenue A. Leon, who weighs about 120 pounds, bends a Coke can and looks a little frightened as he takes off his belt and turns on. Duk Up Soon and Beaver, who had been jiving like pill-high jockeys, silently watch Leon. Envy seems to touch their faces like rain. But they have their turn at the needle and begin rapping. Beaver, tall and very lean, is tensely cool. He shoots, then jumps into the middle of the floor, the needle still in his arm. “Man. Look. Look at that! Man. A fucking bull’s eye. I hit it every time.”

  Presently, Pepe began to nod. Leon played with the expandable key chain attached to Duk Up Soon’s trousers. There were eleven keys on the chain. Only one fit Duk’s transient door. Beaver, cupping his hand over his nose and snorting, began his clean-up campaign. “Man. This pad looks like a pigpen. I gotta have a clean pad. You should see my sister’s pad, a fucking dump.” Watching him, I was listening to Frankie Crocker on WMCA. About an hour later, two teenage boys and a very pretty girl walked in, peering into the semidark room, a little uneasily. They brought knock-wurst, beans, and bread.

  “Shit,” one of them said. “You said you had a pad, and man you ain’t even got a pan.”

  “Fuck,” the pretty girl said to no one in particular. She is fifteen and has a voice like a Bingo Bronx housewife. But her voice grew louder, and she began to put down her two friends.

  “Fuck off, Tommie. You creep,” the pretty girl said, just before she turned on.

  The two friends had turned on and wanted to leave. “Bitch. I’m gonna git rid of you,” Tommie said. “Git your fucking ass together.”

  But the pretty girl was high now, going through the dumbblond bit. She sat down on a milk crate, crossed her fine, bare legs, opened her fringed suède handbag, and began making up her face. It took her almost twenty minutes to paint her lips. “Dumb bitch,” the boyfriend taunted. The girl tried to put on false eyelashes with one hand and hold the mirror with the other.

  “You ain’t got no brains at all,” the boyfriend said, snatching the mirror from the girl’s hand. The girl was very quiet now as if she were alone. Our voices with the rock music were the sounds of people who were in hell and would never get out.

  “Well,” I said finally, “I’ve got to make it.”

  They were damn nice kids, despite the junk. The rapping had mainly been for my benefit. It was their way of showing that they were with it. Why didn’t I call the cops or the narc people? Well, I had talked to these kids and kids like them for a very long time. I knew they had to do their own thing. That is unless they were busted.

  Just the other night, I had an encounter with the cops. “Why don’t you do something about the junkies and pushers?” I said.

  “You should go back to Spanish Harlem,” the cop told me.

  “Sorry. I’m not Puerto Rican.”

  “Then go back up to Eighth Avenue and 125th Street.”

  I laughed.

  Junkies like scavengers overturn litter baskets, looking for the heroin that has been stashed there, or they circle the full green-leafed trees looking for the bags, and no one cares as a slim junkie (using a master key) opens a car trunk, directly in front of Daytop Village on Chrystie Street, and makes off with a flashlight, a battery recharger in the Chinese Garden (officially named Manhattan Bridge Park in English and Chinese). The young Chinese boys play a new sport: baseball. The sun is high in the watery blue sky, and it is a quarter of two in the afternoon. Three junkies shoot up, while on the bridge a hard-hat construction worker looks on in amazement: Yes S. X. was gagging to death, and the others were high and giggled, but Beaver comes in, drags S. X. to the bathroom for a cold shower and ice cubes on his testicles. Dial 911 and watch two teenage boys steal a tire off a car at high noon. Later, I take a junkies count: two hours netted eighty-seven in a limited area, and I wasn’t trying very hard. On Bleecker, a bearded hippie stops me with “Hey, baby. I need seven bags.” Sorry, I say, and another cat comes up and asks what does that honky want, and I tell him, and the two of them make it to the corner, and one-twothreefourfivesixseveneightnineten they are busted by a hip-looking detective on St. Mark’s. The kids are always stoppi
ng me: I am amused because I look so junk hip, and in the Chinese Garden I watch—are you ready—two young men walk over to a tree where two junkies had turned on twenty minutes before; the two young men have a camera, and the fat boy takes off his belt, kneels down, pretends to shoot up as his friend photographs him. Who knows, fake shooting could become a fad in the careless season of real shooting.

  And here I sit popping pills, drinking wine, weighed down with twelve pounds of grief for you, Langston, remembering the reply to your hospital note that I forgot to mail.

  Por favor . . . forgive the delay. I think of you often.

  Now try to rest and think of what you are working on and your future work. That is all except a little good loving . . . now and then.

  Flores, flores . . . from the heart.

  And then . . . When? I can’t remember. During some full-fledged moment of despair, I had written on that note: Just let me close my eyes and die.

  I am dying and you are dead. The people are in mourning. The press has given you the full-dress treatment. They are caroling about your charm, vitality, your prodigious output. Your humor. You were a very logical man who would have been a better poet and writer if you had not been born black in America.

  Ah! The Weary Blues . . . your first book, which you discussed with me last month, sitting in the Cedar Tavern, drinking black coffee and brandy. I had a vodka with beer chaser and listened to your advice. You were one of the few real people I had met during the last two years. I remember you saying: “The Wig disturbed me, and it’s a pity you can’t write another one like it. But don’t. Write another little book like The Messenger. When I was starting out. Man . . .”

  A good night. That last cold night.

  Ah! The Weary Blues . . . no mothergrabber, he did not sell out to whitey with his simple tales. He did not even sell out to himself. He was born in another world. He created something that was real. One dares not mention that this was the only way for him to get published and that he had to eat and buy shoes. And none of it was easy. And it seems to me, Langston, that you knew what your literary black sons haven’t learned: it’s a closed game played on a one-way street.