The low-income Forest Hills project. The claim of nonracial motives and the political under-the-table blackjack game—no matter, no matter! The Forest Hills protest is a Forest Lawn monument to American racism. Would the good people of Forest Hills protest if five hundred of their own kind, five hundred of their black counterparts moved in, early one summer morning?
We’ll shift scenes here. On the Bowery, the ex-blue-collar workers rage in their drunken or dry leather voices about the mugging blacks, welfare, and what they have done for this country, rage about the lack of police protection. Clean-cut, always with a demitasse of coins, and chain-smoking—their eyes are a seismograph of hate. Is it because of my money, clothes, cigarettes, my deceptive youthful aura, or my blackness? One or all?
Last night I visited an old friend, James Anthony Peoples, who lives just below the frontier of Harlem on Central Park West. We had been out of touch for a long time. Now it was midnight, and the goodies had vanished. There was nothing to do but get a six-pack of beer. I crossed 110th Street and Central Park West and thought: Is it any wonder blacks and whites are walking out on the black Broadway musical Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death? Eighth Avenue beyond 110th Street is a living death. The rat-infested tenements remain. Neon-lit bars are gripped with fear. Was I the Man, a new pusher, a new junkie? One bar locked its door because none of the patrons recognized me. There were subway junkies on both sides of the street. Desperation in their eyes, they resembled black ghosts. Dachau survivors. Wearing colorless rags, they were not junkie cool. They were in the caboose of the junkie train. These men and women did not cop and hock stereos, color televisions. Watching their desperate street bits, my heart broke. Life had ended for them. But not for the people who had created them.
I finally copped a six-pack in a superette on 115th Street. It was now almost two in the morning. The superette jammed with bobbing, bad-mouthed teenagers. Vibrancy exploded from them like fireworks. But did they realize that life had already ended for many of them? You can destroy the future’s futile dream, your own frustration, your helplessness with drugs, acts of violence.
Stunned, angry, returned to Peoples’ apartment and casually asked, “Did Frankenstein’s monster kill his master?” Peoples said yes, and I said, Yes, oh my God, yes! What a nice ending for a story.
* * *
Bedded at 5 A.M., I woke up much too early. It was now a little after eight of the same morning. A bottle of beer, Scotch, gin, champagne, chartreuse had left no aftereffects. All I wanted or needed was juice, coffee, a cigarette. I stretched erotically on the yellow Danish sofa in the windowless, paneled Bridal Room.
The mirrored reception room reflected countless images of myself, chandeliers, reminiscent of the French Empire. The room fronted a courtyard, roughly 40 by 60 feet; a rock garden in the Japanese manner, while overhead seagulls seem to skate against a lapis-blue sky. I went into the Gold Room. Yummy, yummy: caviar on a bed of melting ice. Caviar, thin little crackers, hard-boiled eggs, and ginger ale would make a great breakfast—which I enjoyed, sitting in a steel chair, glazed like plywood, that I brought in from the school. I breakfasted facing another garden, offering Oriental serenity. But the quiet was broken by low-flying planes.
Where the hell am I?
In the catering section of a temple on Long Island. Last night I and four other “dish” men arrived. A fast, efficient worker, I was asked to stay over. This happens frequently. I go from temple to temple, hoping that my wages will equal my working ability. I would like to take a leave of absence from Jackson china and try writing again. Money and time. Time and money. A dish man spends a lot of time at Madame Sophie’s employment agency. And time spent waiting in trains, buses, taxis. Nevertheless, the following morning, 7 A.M., I was busing across the Williamsburg Bridge, enjoying a splendid red-gold sunrise, headed for a short gig in the flatlands of Brooklyn. Herbie’s International restaurant, a pleasant place to work. The pay is always decent. At 8:05, a hungover Harold arrived. It had been a wild party the night before. Harold had had very little sleep. “Chief . . . Charlie,” he said. “Some guy made a mess in the men’s room.”
It started at the door, finger-painted the walls. The enclosed toilet was immaculate. The man’s white boxer shorts looked like a psychedelic brown-and-white design and not really revolting—if you didn’t inhale or think about it. The fresh-air ceiling fan had been on all night. A sweet, sickening odor lingered in the men’s room. I looked at myself in the mirror. It seemed I had been stepping in human excrement for a long time. Bitterness, nausea became my epaulets. I considered America, the majority of people I encountered, dung mannequins wearing masks.
Harold and his wife, Lee, were unmasked. Harold and I had coffee and apple pie; then I went back to Madame Sophie’s. At four that afternoon, ten men for “dish” (two Chinese students from Hong Kong), the race-track-addict chauffeur piled into a station wagon and drove to the celebrated Le Mansion in New Jersey. It’s a mother of a place, a bad marriage between Greek Revival and New England colonial. Exquisite banquet rooms accommodate between twenty-five and three thousand people. And, ducks—total confusion. Parties breaking, parties beginning. Guests entering wrong reception rooms. They wore expensive clothes but lacked style. I suppose in their frantic race up the money-and-social ladder, they had forgotten good manners. Waiters, waitresses (the crudity of the waitresses is astonishing, especially a woman who looks like an apple-pie grandmother); the kitchen staff kissed, joked, and drank. “You ruddy-face old bastard. I’m gonna tell my husband!” Other crews arrived, then the young rabbi and masgiach.
The hired help ate in the gentile staff kitchen. I had chicken noodle soup and Dr. Brown’s root beer, thinking, At least they feed you before the work shift begins—promising.
I don’t remember the exact moment when things went bad. Our boss, Mary Louise, a plump vichyssoise black woman appeared, real, motherly. Her second, Uncle Tom’s Shadow, was a dapper Dan, harmless. Our dish crew knocked out the previous party’s dishes in no time. We were knighted with a cleanup detail in the Belmont Room, which was divided into two parts by a red satin curtain. Tables (set up for a wedding supper) were pushed against the wall of section I. The reception in section 2 was ending. But most of the guests did not want to leave. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the band leader implored, “you are invited to attend the wedding ceremony.” The well-dressed guests clamored for hors d’oeuvres, liquor. Waiters, waitresses appeared to be indifferent; they were partying too. A Puerto Rican of African ancestry said, “Everybody lapping up the booze but us. It’s gonna be a long night, and I ain’t got no grass. We’d better hit the whiskey sours. I know this place. It ain’t no ball game.”
The whiskey sours gave us courage to tote party paraphernalia up and down four flights of stairs (the service elevator had conked out before we arrived). Le Mansion’s staff did not want the dish crew to eat the leftover smorgasbord. They watched us as if we were new floor waxers at Tiffany’s. But we foxed them. We’d wheel a beautiful table out into the nineteenth-century incinerator room, rush back for another table like a swift relay team, and feast in the incinerator room, washing down the tidbits with whiskey sours.
By the time we returned to kitchen number I, bourbon-drinking mother Mary Louise had become Hula Mary. Dyed pale pale blue, carnations haloed her smooth dark hair. She split our dish crew into two groups. Eighteen men, two kitchens. It looked as if everything might run as smooth as a diesel train on a country road. The night dragged on, begat little disasters. Dishwashers disappeared. I questioned Mary. She offered me petits fours. My polite Hong Kong helper slowly, gingerly, unwrapped the non-breakable demi-tasse cups and saucers from Japan. The blasting kitchen radio was also from Japan, like Mary’s sterilized rubber gloves.
God has opened the world’s greatest stock exchange in Japan, I told myself. But the cut-glass cigarette holders were made in West Germany. The tea was American, Lipton’s.
It was now almost midnight. Trying to do the work of three me
n, I was getting nowhere. Sotted, Uncle Tom’s Shadow sauntered in, offering advice. The dish feeder said, “Man. Why don’t you go somewhere and fuck yourself?” “Yeah,” I added, “we’ve been working very well without you. Go and have another drink.” “I don’t know what’s wrong with you guys,” the sotted Shadow said and departed. A rack of soup bowls hit the red-tiled floor. From kitchen to kitchen to corridor—you could hear a four-letter Mass.
Mother Mary began going through her tough prison-matron bit. Uncle Tom’s Shadow returned briefly. We threatened to break trays over his head. Then the kitchen staff began putting pressure on us. Watching the clock, the young rabbi in the gray silk suit wanted to know what was happening. I informed him that his kitchen staff was inefficient and stoned. I even mentioned the Bolshevik revolution, the Black Panthers. We were getting paid $1.85 an hour. (The majority of caterers paid $2.00 an hour on weekends. Le Mansion had a reputation and even advertised in New York newspapers.) Then, a silence engulfed the kitchen. We continued working until 3 A.M. No overtime. The grumbling kitchen staff took over.
After dressing, we lined up for pay. They took out seventy-five cents for some nonexistent tax. A tip? Tips filter out before the dishwashers have washed the last dish. However, the host and hostess, who usually come into the kitchen after dinner, displaying benevolent smiles, are unaware of the theft.
We waited in the early-morning darkness for our chauffeur to arrive. The sun was up when we arrived in Manhattan.
AT HOME (the Valencia Hotel overlooking St. Marks Place, conveying a chamber-of-commerce aura of decadence, affluence)—I usually avoid china and glassware. A paper container of iced tea, laced with brandy, a thin Post, a bar-mitzvah cigar. And The New York Times.
MILLIONS IN CITY POVERTY FUNDS LOST BY FRAUD AND INEFFICIENCY
Knocking ash off my cigar, I sighed and crossed my legs. Serious too. Like sitting in a comfortable leather chair at the “club.”
Multiple investigations of the city’s $122 million-a-year anti-poverty program are disclosing chronic corruption and administrative chaos . . .
Pouring a straight brandy, I said, “Shit. I could have told the cocksuckers that two years ago,” and continued to read:
It’s so bad that it will take ten years to find out what’s really been going on inside the Human Resources Administration, said an unnamed assistant district attorney.
America is still painting a portrait of Van Gogh’s “The Potato Eaters.” To hell with arts and crafts, H.R.A.! Culture—cunnilingus! Self-serving sodomy! Work projects, lighthearted cleanup campaigns. Music in the streets, dancing in the streets. Perform for the poor. Three mini-vignettes of waste, money, time, inefficiency at a branch of H.R.A. are on the front lawn of my mind.
It’s all there. Accounts in Swiss banks. A mysterious George José Mendoza Miller. An elderly man in a cubicle Wall Street office. The pulsating glamour of Las Vegas. Parked cars on a street in Los Angeles (straight out of a television detective series). A $52,000 check with Mary Tyler’s private phone number on the back. Now, we’ll switch to Amsterdam and it’s not tulip time. H.R.A.’s money is so mobile—promiscuous dollars! Now, let’s zoom in on the fabulous black “Durham Mob” from North Carolina. Out of sight! A rented car, the fuzz, and Forty-second Street.
Nina, a sensuous black divorcée, mother of three children, has appeared on the front lawn. She has an executive position at an antipoverty agency. Knowing of my financial hangup, she tried to secure a $ gig. I would write reports, Nina would school me. I had autographed copies of The Messenger and The Wig for her boss and went uptown on a fine, sunny morning.
“The switchboard service is lousy,” I said, “and what are all those people doing in the lobby?”
Nina laughed. “Hustling, baby. Everybody wants a piece of Uncle Sam’s money.”
“But they’re well dressed,” I protested.
“I know. Only the poor suffer. Same old story.”
“Enduring?”
“Yes,” Nina agreed, then added: “Bad news, baby. Do you remember meeting a Mr. XX at a party on Riverside Drive?”
“Oh, him. I remember, and his pretentious old lady.”
“He said you had a nasty mouth,” Nina told me. “Bureaucrats don’t like writers. The written word gets them uptight. All they know is numbers, percentages on charts.”
“Now if only I was an out-of-work musician. A junkie or a jailbird,” I fantasized. “Whitey and niggers dig them.”
We laughed, saluted the gig good-bye. Nina sent out for coffee and doughnuts. While we waited, she talked about her program.
“Each time you come up with something that could help the poor, they veto it. I’ve been warned to cool it at meetings. Like the junkie program and the P.S. 201 thing.”
The boy arrived with the coffee and doughnuts. Nina could not wash her lovely hands in the office basin. It had been clogged up for a month. The American government paid a yearly rental of $25,000 for these three old creaky floors. It was not one of Harlem’s better buildings.
Nina signed papers, talked on the phone, gave instructions to her secretary. Then she went down in the elevator with me. We talked on the sidewalk and watched the late-summer Harlem scene pass. Nina pressed two tens and a five in my hand.
“Get stoned or laid, baby,” she said, then added: “See that sports car on the opposite side of the street? It belongs to an office boy. He’s stealing the place blind.”
Let’s take a trip upstate. The one-way bus fare to South Fallsburg, New York, is almost six dollars. In August 1968, a branch of the Neighborhood Youth Corps spent almost thirty dollars of the government’s money sending five young blacks to the Flagler Hotel (Catskill territory). I do not know who paid for their return (I was down at the lake, drinking wine). All I know is that four boys and one girl, well dressed and very clean, arrived one gray afternoon, under the impression that they would become counselors—according to the gospel of the Neighborhood Youth Corps. The boys did not like the living quarters. “Man, it’s a barn,” I remember one of them saying. But they were young, lived in another world, and did not know that stables, barns are comfortable and sometimes chic.
The girl was signed on as a maid. The boys were to be part of the dish crew. But one boy, a suit-and-tie boy, wanted to work in the office. He said he could type forty-five words per minute. I remember the boy taking his pajamas from his luggage, arranging his shoes at the foot of his bed. I rapped with them in the former stable, then took them to meet the dish crew, who were Southern blacks. Always trying for the diplomat’s degree, I tried to open the barrier between them: an impasse. After dinner that night, the hotel manager was perceptive enough to realize the teenagers would not groove in a Catskill scene, and they left the following morning.
Now, you know I am joshing. Is there any wonder why I love fiction? Dig: a friend, Larl Becham, had secured a gig at an antipoverty branch which was preparing a musical for the black community, and end-of-the-season gala. Becham was the choreographer and assistant director. Considering his experience, reputation, the lavish poverty giveaway, he was paid nothing—$100 a week. The teenagers were paid $45 a week to study voice and dance. Most of them were not interested in voice and dance. The boys and girls who were interested in voice and dance were in the Harlem tenements, the streets, sitting on stoops, standing on street corners. The boys and girls I saw at rehearsal had boogalooed under the wire with connections. I remember one girl, the color of hand-rubbed teakwood. Awkward, sullen, she knocked down $45 a week because one of the “big fish” was trying to make her.
Becham gave me the script to read. Only the author (the director and brother of the agency chief) could relate to the script. It was the type of musical MGM might have considered in 1886 and turned down.
“Can you believe we are opening next week?” Becham asked.
Another brandy, Nathanael West? Let’s buy Eartha Kitt Calanthe harrissii orchids, jade, ropes of pearls. Let’s listen to her rich, bitter laughter . . .
&n
bsp; Before ’Mericans heard of Our Lady of Beautification, Lady Bird Johnson, and before all those black and white performers brought alms to poor blacks, Eartha Kitt, in the late ’50s, had her own unpublicized antipoverty program at the Harlem Y.M.C.A. Miss Kitt’s first love was dance, and she had been a member of the Katherine Dunham Dance Company. She sponsored the Eartha Kitt Dance foundation. Larl Becham taught the classes. Any black child could take free dance classes. You did not have to be a friend of a friend or have someone get sweaty hands, thinking about how you would be in bed with a couple of drinks, a little pot.
Revolting? I have an idea that one day black and white bureaucrats will succeed in eating Uncle Sam’s beard, balls, navel, and the money itself.
Anyway, Birdie Greene, the maid, wants to clean my room, and I have to take the train to Philly, to the City of Brotherly Love.
Shot down in Manhattan, my mood was like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s at Princeton. A lost writer in Philly, covering rock’s elegant gypsies, Sly & The Family Stone. A taxi strike or what the hell? Popped a couple of pills, encountered the Doubtful Mushroom Company. Waited and waited for the Broad Street bus. Bolted into a Forty-second Street type of zone and found a cab at last.
The Second Quaker Rock Festival was held at the Spectrum Arena. An estimated 8,000 to 10,000 fans had made the pilgrimage. The ritual began at the upsetting hour of 7 P.M. Now, it was 9 P.M. and you couldn’t get a beer, babe. The brandy pint was at half mast.
“Too many teenagers,” a guard told me. “We don’t want no riots out here.” Popped another pill, sipped Coke, dug the crowd, promenading in their boutique and department store costumes. They were not as funky and fashionable as the Fillmore East crowd. I expected these earthlings to go home, change clothes, audition for a Crest commercial.
The Collected Novels of Charles Wright Page 33