Jimmy fumbled around his uncle’s car for a pen, a scrap of paper, anything to write down the words the man said, but he found only pennies and cigarette butts buried deep in the burgundy upholstery. Jimmy turned the names over and over in his mind. What was it he said? Paul Chambers, Eric something, Freddie what? The only thing he could remember was the name of the album and he repeated it to himself like a broken record until Floyd came back, his hair disheveled and a blank look in his eyes.
“Have you ever heard of an album called Blues and the—”
But Floyd told him to shut the fuck up and switched off the radio. As he drove away, he kept one eye fixed on the woman in his rearview mirror, who looked the other direction and exhaled a long stream of smoke like a lonely cloud.
Jimmy had no more luck getting reception of WKWK 1080 AM in his bedroom than he did finding a copy of Blues and the Abstract Truth alongside The Beach Boys, Beatles and Elvis in the record rack at the Franklin Five & Dime around the corner.
And when Jimmy asked Uncle Floyd when he might be going back over there, Floyd cut him a look and said, “Never. I ain’t never going back there again.” Floyd opened a can of Coors Light and sat down next to him and said, “I told her I loved her, after so many years of going there, pretending I was just there for some trim. I told her everything I’d been thinking about for months, I told her I’d take her out of there, bring her home with me, make her honest. And do you know what she did, Jim?”
Jimmy shook his head.
“She laughed. Threw that black whore head of hers back and laughed. Told me there was no way I was going to take her out of there. ‘What you going to do, Floyd?’ she said. ‘Going to move me into your white mama’s house? You think she’s going to let me live there, let me shit in her toilet?’
“And I told her yeah, I don’t care, I’ll get us our own house. But it didn’t matter. She kept right on laughing. She wouldn’t even give me a freebie that night.” Floyd paused, took a long sip of his beer and said, “So no, I ain’t going back there never.”
While this made Jimmy feel sorrier than ever for his uncle, it did nothing to help him get ahold of that album or get him back over to where he could hear WKWK 1080 AM again. He’d known people who got hooked on drugs, and his own grandfather had died from alcoholism, but Jimmy had never felt like he needed anything before this music. It was different, was nothing like what they played at the school dance, or what his older sister listened to, and he needed it, he imagined, like a junkie needed a fix. Needed it so bad that after a few days, he got on a crosstown bus and went back.
Without the night shadows and flickering streetlights, Jimmy could see the flowers in the window at Isola’s Beauty Salon and the sidewalk swept clean in front of the Shoe and Boot Repair and Shine Shop. From the speaker outside the door of WKWK 1080 AM, a song ended and the same sweet voice came across the airwaves. “That there, my friends, was Peaches & Herb’s, ‘Let’s Fall in Love.’ If any of y’all out there have anyone you want to fall in love with, give me a call and tell me about it; maybe I can help you out. 329-0055. Here’s a new one from Brenda and the Tabulations, ‘Don’t Make Me Over’—don’t you do it, now.”
Jimmy pushed open the door.
Ulysses Wolfe wore thick bifocal glasses with brown plastic frames and his hair in a short salt-and-peppered natural. When he smiled, you could see his gold tooth on the front left. But he had never been generous with his smiles, and he certainly didn’t smile when Jimmy lumbered through the door.
“You a little early, ain’t you?” Ulysses said.
“Early?” Jimmy said. “I don’t know, I thought you played jazz all day.”
Ulysses took in the boy, with his dusty hair and striking blue eyes. He noticed how Jimmy had rolled the front of his shirt up in a ball with his hands. “Aren’t you looking for the whores?” he asked.
“No,” Jimmy said, “I’m looking for the Abstract Truth.”
Ulysses didn’t have time for Jimmy, but Jimmy came around anyway. One thing Ulysses would give him, was that he sure wasn’t short on persistence. Jimmy hit him with question after question—mostly about music, and it didn’t matter that Ulysses grunted answers at him, that he made fun of him over the airwaves, or that he was often downright cruel. Jimmy kept showing up. And once school started, Jimmy left each morning like he was getting on the school bus and instead made his way across town.
It was Ulysses who gave Jimmy his nickname. He liked to tell his audience about how even though Jimmy was so fat, you’d think he was starving, the way he asked questions. “You’d think he was skin-n-bones,” he said one night. After that, Ulysses would announce over the airwaves, “Hey y’all, Mr. Skin-n-Bones is up in here again. Doin‘ what he do best, askin‘ questions and gettin‘ on my last nerve. Didn’t even know I had any nerves left for him to get on, but here he is, wreckin‘ the very last one I got. Mr. Wolfe, can you play this? Mr. Wolfe, who’s that singing on that? Mr. Wolfe, can you put on James Brown ‘Sex Machine’ one more time? Like he some kind of sex machine or something. So here it is for y’all, the Godfather of Soul, care of the seductive Mr. Skin-n-Bones.”
Jimmy looked up from the pile of records Ulysses had given him to put back on the shelves and said, “But Mr. Wolfe, I didn’t ask you to play ‘Sex Machine.’”
“So? What you care for?”
“Well, it isn’t good to lie.”
“You white, ain’t you? That’s what y’all do. No use in stopping now.”
By Thanksgiving, Ulysses had taken to simply calling him Bones, and by Christmas folks were calling in and asking after him. Jimmy liked being Bones. It put a swagger in his walk, lit cigarettes for him and splashed aftershave on his neck. As soon as Jimmy walked out of his house in the morning, Jimmy’s new identity wrapped onto him like a scuba suit. Only thing left of Little Jimmy were his eyes peeking out, blue and still afraid.
When his parents got the note that he failed the year and wouldn’t be graduating, his father stripped Jimmy of his nickname and his newfound armor, stripped him down to the shirt off his back and hit him with a switch from the tree in the yard, with a belt he pulled from his waist, but when he went for a chair from the dining room table, his mother pulled her own mountain of a body off of the sagging sofa and stood between them.
“Jimmy baby,” she said. “Go on, now, get. This ain’t going to end in nothing but blood and mayhem. I’ll let you know when it’s safe to come back.”
And Jimmy left.
Ulysses endured Bones’s blubbering, his constant going to the mirror to look at the marks across his expansive back for a while. Ulysses even let himself get a little kick out of it. “Umm hmm,” he said. “Don’t feel good, do it? It’s what your people been doing to my people for hundreds of years and you up in here snotting everywhere after one little whooping. I don’t know what you so worried for, you white and a man, this whole world is set up for you. Can’t nobody tell you not to do nothing.”
Bones stopped crying. “What should I do, Mr. Wolfe?” He said. “Cause, I ain’t going home.”
“Well you gonna have to go away from around here. This ain’t no refugee camp.”
“That’s the thing, Mr. Wolfe,” Bones said. “I don’t got nowhere else I can go. I’ll go anywhere, anywhere but home.”
Ulysses leaned back in his chair and scratched his chin, then he wrote down the words Jimmy’s Records on a piece of paper with an address and handed it to Bones.
“This is in St. Louis,” Bones said.
“Yeah. That’s my man Jimmy Wallace. I know, I know, his name is Jimmy too. He’s an old friend of mine. He’s got a record store up there in St. Louis. I ain’t heard from him in a minute, but he said if I—or anyone I know—ever wanted to get out of Memphis, he’d give ’em a job.”
Bones stood up and walked around the room. “A record store?” he said. “That’s even better than a radio station.” He stopped and looked at Ulysses. “No offense, Mr. Wolfe. I j
ust don’t have the knack for it, you know?”
“Shit, you ain’t gotta tell me.”
“How do you know he’ll give me a job?”
“I don’t.”
“How do you know I won’t get up there and find it was a waste of time?”
Ulysses shrugged and said, “I don’t. But don’t say I ain’t never done nothing for you.”
TRACK 7
Once in a While
DOWNTOWN ST. LOUIS IN 1973 was majestic—with closely packed buildings, boasting wide stone steps and thick, heavy columns—but, it was damn near abandoned other than the cars that sped past on the broad avenues. Bones pressed his face against the filthy windows of Jimmy’s Records and saw sad rows of empty shelves covered in a thick shroud of dust. Along the walls were what looked like crates and crates of records. A menacing chain padlocked the door.
On the entire 1400 block of Washington Avenue, the only store that looked open was the one with a huge white sign that said Levine Hat Co. Bones huffed up the hill and through the door. The walls were lined with photos of presidents in hats, movie stars in hats, old war photographs of soldiers in hats. And everywhere Bones looked there were hats. Straw hats with wide brims, felt hats with satin ribbons, black rubber police hats, bowlers in every color. There were top hats under glass, wool caps and berets stacked high like colorful pancakes. And behind the counter stood an old woman so short that Bones didn’t see her until she came out and ordered him into an upholstered chair and proceeded to try to put a clear plastic helmet on his head.
“Excuse me,” Bones said, hoping to interrupt, to let her know that he didn’t, in fact, want to buy a hat.
“Name’s Ethel,” she told him. “Ethel Levine. And I’m sorry about the plastic helmet, but I have to,” she said. “Keeps the lice off the hats, you know. Lousy people, they try on the hats, then you try on the hat, and before you know it,” she stopped and held up both hands, “an epidemic.”
“Ma’am,” Bones said, the plastic helmet now fixed over his head, pressing his eyebrows down into his eyes. “I’m not looking to buy a hat.”
Ethel blinked at him and said, “You don’t want a hat?”
“No, ma’am.”
“What are you here for then? You selling something? Because I can’t buy nothing. You’ll have to come back when my son is here. He’s the boss now. It’s because of him that you have to wear that stupid helmet and you’ll have to come back Monday. We close tomorrow, for the Sabbath. Are you Jewish?”
“No,” Bones said. “I’m not.”
“Didn’t think so. You don’t look it, but these days you can’t tell with the mixing and matching that’s going on. Not that I object, I mean love is love, right? And not love is not love. My husband was as Jewish as they came, but I wish he hadn’t taken so long to die. Then maybe I could have had some fun in my life. Now he’s finally gone, but you know what? His son is even worse than his father.” She stopped talking and said to Bones, “You can take that thing off your head if you want. What did you say you were doing here, again?”
Bones removed the plastic helmet. “Do you know anything about that record store down the block, Jimmy’s?”
“I know it. Been closed for near six months now. Jimmy got sick and went home, never came back. I went to check on his wife Millie a month or so ago, she said Jimmy died. Just went to sleep and didn’t wake up. That’s the way every one of us hopes we’ll go and good for him, he deserved it.”
“I’d like to talk to her,” Bones said. “Do you know how I can find her?”
Ethel snatched the plastic helmet from Bones’s hands. “I know who you are,” she said. “You’re some kind of tax collector or a debt collector. Come after those good people to take everything they got. Why don’t people like you leave people like them alone? Maybe you think because they’re colored that I’ll help you, well you got that part wrong, fat man. I know good people when I see them and good don’t have a color, you understand me?”
For a moment Bones thought she might hit him with the helmet now that she had him backed to the door. He held up his hands as if he were at gunpoint and said, “No, no, no. Please, you don’t understand, I want to buy the store.” The words came out with way more confidence than anything Bones had ever said in his life and certainly more confidence than he felt.
“You want to what?” Ethel said.
“Buy the store.”
“You’re nothing but a kid. Do you have money like that?”
“I’ve got an uncle. My uncle Floyd. He’s got a bunch of money, said he would help me out,” Bones said. Now that he had said it, he felt as if he were looking at Ethel through the lens of a camera that only just came into focus. He saw the gray hairs that sprouted out of a mole on her cheek, the faded brown and white flowers of her dress, its fabric so thin it might rip if he hugged her too tight, and so he rested a hand on her angular shoulder and smiled.
Ethel drew her face to a point and squinted at Bones. “I guess we better go see Millie then.”
Bones didn’t know whether to be more terrified of Ethel crashing the car, since she barely saw over the dashboard, or of actually buying a record store. He balled up his shirt and looked out of the window at North St. Louis where the buildings, lives and cars sat scattered in various states of despair. It reminded him a bit of the neighborhood around WKWK and he kept his eyes out for a storefront radio station.
Ethel parked the car in front of a squat, one-story house that looked exactly like every other house on the block. “You sure she’s home?” Bones said.
“Don’t know where else she’d be,” Ethel said.
The paint around the windows had fallen off in chunks onto a patch of faded plastic flowers behind a small, bent-up fence. In the distance, Bones heard the bark of a small dog; otherwise it was strikingly silent. Ethel walked up the two short front steps and rang the ancient doorbell. After a few moments, she knocked loudly on the screen door.
“Millie, it’s me, Ethel,” she yelled. “Brought someone round to see you. You in there?”
Bones tried futilely to straighten out the creases he’d made in his shirt.
A woman, even smaller than Ethel, opened the door. She wore a long, faded housedress. Her white afro made a soft halo around her face.
“Who’s there?” she said, squinting through the dirty screen door.
“It’s Ethel, for heaven’s sakes. I told you to let me take you to the eye doctor, you’ve gone damn near blind now haven’t you?”
“You here to take me to the eye doctor, Ethel?”
“No, no. I’m here to bring you this, this Jimmy, here. Says he wants to buy your Jimmy’s store.”
Millie clicked the lock on the screen door and opened it. “C’mon then,” she said.
The hot, stagnant air of the home smelled of years of spilled whiskey, cigarette ashes, and loss. Bones wondered why she didn’t open the windows, but as he sat down on the plush, burgundy, stiff-backed sofa under a painting of black Jesus, he thought that maybe Millie Wallace’s would crumble without the smells there to hold her up.
“His name was Jimmy, too,” Millie said, and smiled at Bones as he drank the tea she’d handed to him in a chipped china cup with a matching saucer.
“That’s right,” Bones said. “Mr. Wolfe told me that.”
“Humph, Ulysses,” Millie said. “He made a whole host of promises to help my Jimmy out and never came through.”
“Maybe that’s why he sent me here.”
Millie gave a short laugh. “I doubt that.” She swirled the tea around in her delicate cup and said, “Tell me something, what makes you think you’re going to do better than my Jimmy did?”
Bones balled up his shirt again. “I don’t know that I’m going to do better, Ms. Wallace. But I think I want to try.”
“Well don’t try it here, I’ll give you that much advice,” Millie said.
Bones nodded and wondered if it would be rude to ask if he
could smoke.
“St. Louis wasn’t always like this,” Millie said. “Believe it or not, this used to be a nice part of town. Businesses did well here, schools too. People were happy, kept to themselves. Then you people had to desegregate everything and messed it up.”
Bones looked up, a little shocked. “What do you mean desegregation messed it up?”
“Took everything away from folks. Used to be that white people didn’t know and didn’t care what went on on the North Side. As long as they didn’t have to see or think about the coloreds, they were happy. Then desegregation happened and next thing you know, white people find out colored people are making money, are living happy successful lives and there’s not a white person in sight making a single dollar off of it? Heavens. It’s been downhill ever since.
“The Italians, they came in with their drugs. Then the Jews—your people, Ethel,” Millie said, pointing her tea cup in Ethel’s direction, “they came in, opening banks and businesses, buying up the houses only to tear ‘em down. Pretty soon everything was taken away—especially the dignity of folks; stole off with that, first thing.”
Bones looked over at Ethel, who was nodding. “She’s telling the truth, Jimmy so listen up,” Ethel said. “This town isn’t what it could have been.”
“Well maybe it can be,” Bones said. Both ladies looked at each other and laughed.
“You’re a young one, Young Jimmy,” Millie said. “And I can’t sell you the store. Bank’s already took that, but if you think you can do something with those records, well you go on down there and look it through. Come back and make me an offer I won’t refuse.”
The following morning, Bones called Floyd and asked him to loan him enough to buy the records, pay a few months’ rent and maybe even pay himself a few dollars too. Floyd told him he’d send the money up Western Union the following day if Bones promised to let him know whether there were pretty girls in St. Louis.
There You Are Page 8